Comptabilització de les vendes

I turn now to a selection of popular nineteenth-century composition and rhetoric textbooks that contain a set of exercises in arrangement common during this time. The interrelationship of invention and arrangement figures prominently in these exercises, as well as in the composition of the textbooks themselves. These books are compilations whose compilers readily characterize their work as reuse in which arrangement is central. The compiler Albert Newton Raub, for example, suggests that what he has added to the derivative materials making up his textbook is an arrangement both “practical” and “interesting” (4). James R. Boyd similarly illuminates his process as one of accumulating and selecting worthwhile materials and then presenting them in a valuable, convenient arrangement (iv). In elaborating the rhetorical canons, some of these books also include arrangement within the realm of invention (Day 35; Raub 258).

4 _{One exception is Brown 2012, which acknowledges a need to move beyond the argument, already affirmed by}

many in composition studies, that DJs offer rhetorical methods that are valuable to the teaching and study of writing. He begins distinguishing between examples of remix, particularly with regard to their modes of delivery. However, this important discerning move becomes buried in Brown’s elaboration of what he calls “dromological” composition. He uses remix to introduce new terminology rather than challenge or reshape composition more

These textbook compilers thus practice rearrangement techniques analogous to those that their exercises teach. Their exercises in rearrangement show that invention and arrangement, though classically considered distinct canons of rhetoric, can merge. They position arrangement as central to composition by recasting writing as an act of arranging and rearranging preexisting textual elements. They ask students to arrange miscellaneous words into a sentence (Boyd; Harvey); to rearrange the order of words in existing sentences (Hart; R. G. Parker; Swinton; Williams); to synthesize sentences into paragraphs (Waddy); and to create narratives from detached sentences (Parker; Swinton). This range of exercises demonstrates how concerns of arrangement will enter into a text at all levels, from constructing sentences and paragraphs to organizing complete narratives, essays, and even books like these compilations. I begin at the local level with the sentence because it makes particularly clear that arrangement affects meaning, thanks to the ready effects that syntactical manipulations produce. But this relationship between arrangement and meaning extends beyond the concerns of grammar to the concerns of rhetoric when one begins manipulating larger chunks of text—hence the classical formulation that arrangement concerns the sequence of parts in an oration.

Some of these exercises prompt students to generate new, additional textual elements as a result of rearranging those provided, and thus, they point to the production of new text as one potential sign of invention via rearrangement. They position arrangement as a productive stepping-stone to further composition, while other exercises more fully showcase the meaning- making properties of arrangement by demonstrating that rearrangement of prior materials can be inventive on its own—no new text necessary. I highlight these latter exercises here in order to begin with the strongest case for the inventive potential of rearrangement.

Below is a representative exercise from R. G. Parker’s 1832 textbook Progressive Exercises in English Composition that requires students to build sentences under great constraint: they must generate variety while relying entirely upon the words provided.

Figure 1: Parker's Sentence Rearrangement Exercise

The instructions state, “Sentences consisting of parts and members, and sometimes very simple sentences, can be variously arranged, preserving the same idea. The following sentences are to be written (or read) in as great a variety of arrangement as the pupil can invent” (10). Beneath

the model sentence are five variations on it, each with its phrases and clauses differently arranged. Rearranging these “parts and members” may seem an insignificant mechanical task, creating or contributing nothing, yet hints of invention do emerge: changes in emphasis or effect readily occur as the writer repositions syntactical structures on the page. Rearrangement does not entirely preserve the same idea, as Parker proposes, but introduces slight shifts in meaning.

Consider the model sentence: “On the fifth day of the month, which I always keep holy, I ascended the high hills of Bagdad, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer.” This sentence seems to reflect on the past because it foregrounds the date by beginning with the phrase “On the fifth day of the month.” In contrast, the third sentence after the model emphasizes what motivated the speaker that day because it begins, “In order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer.” A note beneath the final variation admits, in fact, that the above sentences are not actually equivalent: “It is recommended to Teachers to require the pupil to tell which arrangement of the sentence he thinks the best.” Likewise, alongside a similar rearrangement exercise in another composition textbook, A School Manual of English Composition (1887) by William Swinton, is this explanatory remark: “The particular place that a phrase should occupy will generally depend on the sense intended; hence phrases should usually be placed beside the parts of the sentence they are designed to modify” (11). If appropriate arrangement depends upon what the writer wishes to convey, then rearrangement—the exercise that students are performing here—can, as I have shown, introduce a new “sense,” a sign of invention that does not depend upon the addition of new text. Exercises such as this one show that rearrangement alone is a productive form of writing and that one sign of its productivity is meaning- or sense-making.

In dramatizing how invention seeps through even the most elemental, sentence-level manipulations, exercises like Parker’s reveal the fundamental interconnectedness of invention and arrangement. When one is composing under the kinds of constraints that these exercises impose, making only limited arrangements possible, the effects of moving and manipulating each element become magnified. Each attempt at rearrangement produces a subtle change in meaning or emphasis. Sentence exercises such as these deserve attention today not only because they can show scholars how arrangement and invention merge, but also because they have pedagogical implications with continued value for student-writers. Attending to arrangement on the sentence level through exercises like these can sharpen a writer’s sense of the intricate ways in which meaning and emphasis stem, in part, from location. One can see how meaning changes as words, sentences, blocks of text, and by extension, images and objects change their placement and also their relationships to one another. Exercises in arrangement and rearrangement can foster a critical awareness of location, space, and design; they can promote a way of thinking.

In addition, writers come to see through repositioning syntactical structures in as many ways as they can that bits of preexisting language have inventive potential in and of themselves and furthermore, that this potential can be revealed through play and manipulation. While Swinton suggests that “the sense intended” will guide arrangement, Parker’s exercise shows that a writer need not begin composing with a sense of the meaning or effect he or she intends to produce. Rather, language can be manipulated to present multiple possibilities, including those that one could not anticipate before initiating the manipulation. Interaction with language reveals its possibilities. Constrained exercises that challenge students to interact with language in new and multiple ways have generative value.

Remix scholarship has championed similar assignments that call for combining, juxtaposing, and arranging textual components. For example, Susan H. Delagrange advocates for student projects in arrangement by connecting them to the shadow boxes of twentieth-century visual artist Joseph Cornell and the composing methods promised by digital technologies. Yet textual practices like exercises from composition’s history can illuminate this connection on their own, without the need to leap from visual arts back to writing. Attention to arrangement does not require a move to multimodal composition: it can reenergize the study of structures and sentences in any medium.

Consider, for example, the opening remarks to James R. Boyd’s widely used nineteenth- century textbook Elements of Rhetoric and Literary Criticism, first published in 1844:

Even the humble business of copying accurately from a book, from reading books, geographies, grammars, or any other text-book, is a suitable exercise, until it can be done with exactness in every particular. Why is it that those who are accustomed to set type in a printing-office not only spell well, but so generally learn to compose well, but that they have thus employed themselves in copying the language of those who compose well? (x)

Boyd seems needlessly preoccupied with correctness here, yet his analogy between composing and setting type is nonetheless illuminating. It imagines writing as a material practice, one that requires physically arranging and rearranging preexisting elements, a repetitive activity from which one gains a sense of the locations or “slots” where words, phrases, sentences, and other bits of text fit—that is, a sense of space and of how that space and the objects within it combine to create meanings. Boyd may mean to stress only the benefit of copying from good writers, but for me, his question suggests a visual analogue to nineteenth-century exercises in rearrangement,

many of which appear in his own text. It posits an externalized model of invention and discovery that encourages experimenting on the page with combinations of text that may yield effective writing. As Boyd notes, repeating this kind of exercise develops a writer’s understanding of how changes to syntax will affect meaning and emphasis and thus how arrangement more broadly generates meaning. Boyd provides a preview of the technical-material model of invention that I advance in this project.