Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies

in Composition Studies from a

Girardian Perspective
Kathleen M. Vandenberg
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

I
n his 1991 essay, “Innovation and Repetition,” René Girard notes that “our
world has always believed that ‘to be innovative’ and ‘to be imitative’ are two
incompatible attitudes. This was already true when innovation was feared;
now that it is desired, it is truer than ever.”1 In making this argument, Girard
surveys the transition between a world that embraced tradition and a world
that rejected it as unoriginal, a change he marks as occurring due to the shifts in
thinking occurring during the time from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
It is his contention in his 1991 article, as in all of his work on mimetic desire,
that regardless of our attitude toward imitation and innovation, humans are, have
always been, and will always be mimetic creatures, specifically so in our desires.
As is well known to Girardian scholars, this contention is explicated in his theory
on triangular desire, in which, as he explains, individuals come to their desires
through observation and imitation of the desires of those models they emulate.
As he explains, “to say that our desires are imitative or mimetic is to root them
neither in their objects nor in ourselves, but in a third party, the model or media-
tor, whose desire we imitate in the hope of resembling him or her.”2
Coming, as I do, from the field(s) of rhetoric and composition, I find
Girard’s ideas about the dialectic between imitation and innovation particularly
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 18, 2011, pp. 111–134. ISSN 1075-7201.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

111
112 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

compelling insofar as they illuminate some tensions that have played out both
in the ancient field of rhetoric and in the (relatively new) field of American
composition studies over the last 60-odd years. I propose that it can be particu-
larly productive to use Girardian theory as a way to understand the dialectic
between these tensions, especially as they have played out against a larger set of
beliefs about the world, the self, and the role of composition in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century composition classrooms. Although there has been some
treatment of Girard in composition studies, those studies have been concerned
more with the relationship between composition students (as imitators) and
teachers (as models) insofar as those relationships have potentially been sites
of power, authority, resistance, and “violence” (albeit not physical). While I
do believe that part of the work of the composition teacher may be to model
desirable behaviors for students, my larger concern is with the mimetic rela-
tionship established between students and the academic discourse community
(and thus with the corpus of works preceding them in any number of academic
disciplines). To be even more precise, I am interested in interrogating how
Girard’s ideas about imitation intersect with and profitably illuminate debates
over imitation pedagogy in composition studies.

IMITATION IN CLASSICAL RHETORIC

To understand the place of imitation pedagogy in composition studies, it is

necessary to first look at attitudes toward imitation over the long arc of rheto-
ric’s history.3 Regarding the place of imitation pedagogy in Western educational
systems, Muckelbauer notes that “in terms of pedagogy alone, imitation was the
single most common instructional method in the west for well over two millen-
nia. From the time of Gorgias until the middle of [the twentieth] century, any
student who received formal education at any level was almost certainly sub-
jected to explicit exercises in imitation.”4 It was not merely the case that the stu-
dent of ancient times was expected to be proficient at communicating—rather,
the educational system as a whole was seen as a way to ensure that students
became good citizens, and, as such, the system was responsible for teaching not
just composition but cultural values. To ensure this end, imitation was, as Dale
Sullivan explains, “considered an essential pedagogical method,” one that “was
thought to be a way to impart skill in oratory and, at the same time, to inculcate
cultural values.”5
Historically, in both literature and rhetoric, the concept of imitation has
been understood in two ways, though these understandings have evolved over
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 113

time. George Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradi-
tion offers a good starting place for this discussion:

The word for “imitation” in Greek is mimesis [and it] is used in several senses. To
Plato, the visible world around us was a mimesis of a nonmaterial, eternal reality of
“ideas.” In Aristotle’s Poetics, mimesis is used to mean the imitation of action in the
plot of a tragedy; and more generally the arts are said in Greek to “imitate” reality.6

In the second sense, imitation is understood as a method of copying reality for,

or in, the creation of some artistic object or text. In this sense, it is more often
referred to by the Greek word mimesis and defined as “the interpretation of real-
ity through literary representation.”7 In this sense also, the concern is with liter-
ary criticism, with ascertaining the value of works according to the degree of
their resemblance to reality. Some of the earliest comprehensive and influential
treatments of this concept occur in works by Aristotle, as when, in his Rhetoric,
he argues that

since learning and admiring are pleasant, all things connected with them must also
be pleasant; for instance, a work of imitation, such as painting, sculpture, poetry,
and all that is well imitated, even if the object is not pleasant; for it is not this that
causes pleasure or the reverse, but the inference that the imitation and the object
imitated are identical, so that the result is that we learn something.8

As editor Stephen Halliwell’s introduction to the Loeb edition of Aristotle’s Poet-

ics points out, Aristotle’s conception of mimesis did not mean that poets were
confined to rigid, static methods of artistic activity. Instead, as Halliwell notes,
“without ever offering a definition of the term . . . Aristotle employs mimesis as
a supple concept of the human propensity to explore an understanding of the
world—above all, of human experience itself—through fictive representation
and imaginative ‘enactment’ of experience.”9
The other way to understand imitation, and the one more relevant to the
purposes of this article, is to view it as a pedagogical tool, a method of con-
sciously copying the techniques of a superior artist in order to improve one’s
own technique. This understanding is also articulated in the Poetics when Aris-
totle notes that “it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in
mimesis. Indeed this distinguishes them from other animals: man is the most
mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest under-
standing” (1448b.iv).10
In 55 b.c., the great Roman orator and politician Cicero composed De
114 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

Oratore, a work in which he seeks to reconcile the concept of the ideal orator
with the concept of the eloquent philosopher of intellectual depth and civic
usefulness. A dialogue concerned solely with primary rhetoric, De Oratore situ-
ates rhetoric as a part of politics and outlines the duties or offices of rhetoric as
probare, delectare, and movere or flectere: to teach, to please, and to move. The
eloquence needed to do this, Cicero argues, is the result of an art developed
through practice and training, which includes—among other things, the read-
ing of good poetry, the memorization of great speeches, and the translation of
Greek speeches. In other words, to become a great orator, one must practice
imitation. As Cicero (speaking as Antony) asserts in book 2, it is essential

that we show the students whom to copy, and to copy in such a way as to strive with
all possible care to attain the most excellent qualities of his model. Next let practice
be added, whereby in copying he may reproduce the pattern of his choice and not
portray him as time and again I have known many copyists do, who in copying hunt
after such characteristics as are easily copied or even abnormal and possibly faulty.
(2.22.90)11

This advice is repeated in much greater depth by Quintilian (who himself

considered Cicero a model for imitation) in Institutio Oratoria, his 12-book
work on rhetoric, which stresses the orator’s ability to lead, to influence, and
to dominate a rhetorical situation through verbal art. This work on rhetoric is
significant, in part, because it incorporates the whole subject of rhetoric into
a total educational system. In this way, rhetoric becomes a part of education,
and the goal of education becomes the creation of a great orator or vir bonus
dicendi peritus—“a good man speaking well” (1.Pr.9).12 Quintilian’s treatment
of imitation fits into his larger scheme of teaching methods, methods that are
divided into five main categories: Precept, Imitation, Composition exercises
(progymnasmata), Declamation, and Sequencing. 13
First, Quintilian lays down the rules for a method and system of speaking
(the five canons—inventio, dipositio, elocutio, memoria, actio); he then turns to
the use of models, outlining specific exercises to be used in order to improve
one’s own speeches. These methods include lectio (reading aloud), praelectio
(detailed analysis of a text), memorization of models, paraphrasing of models,
transliteration, recitation of paraphrase or transliteration, and correction of
paraphrase and transliteration.
In book 3 of his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian reviews the nature, aim,
and scope of rhetoric, incorporating advice from those before him. In par-
ticular, he focuses on the sources for oratorical ability: nature, art—including
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 115

imitation—and practice. He returns to his treatment of imitation in books 8

through 10, whereupon he explains how style can be improved by imitating and
emulating good models. Here he warns that while models selected for emula-
tion and imitation have a “genuine and natural force,” all imitation “is artificial,”
and “the greatest qualities of the orator are beyond all imitation,” by which he
means “talent, invention, force, facility, and all the qualities which are indepen-
dent of art” (10.2.11–14).14 However, Quintilian still asserts that it is from

authors worthy of our study that we must draw our stock of words, the variety of
our figures and our methods of composition, while we must form our minds on the
model of every excellence. For there can be no doubt that in art no small portion of
our task lies in imitation, since, although invention came first and is all-important, it
is expedient to imitate whatever has been invented with success. And it is a universal
rule of life that we should wish to copy what we approve in others. (10.2.1)15

Although he advises imitating excellent models, Quintilian warns that

pupils must not be content with mere imitation, for if one were to copy with
no alteration, there would be no progress in any of the arts.16 In addition, he
points out that invention alone is not sufficient, “if only for the reason that a
sluggish nature is only too ready to rest content with the inventions of others”
(10.2.5–7).17
For those not content merely to copy, Quintilian then offers some rules or
guidelines for how to go beyond copying. First, he suggests, students should
consider whom to imitate, and then, he advises, students should move beyond
merely imitating words; they must consider first whether or not the words
they are imitating are appropriate or decorous. Because different situations
demand different styles, Quintilian encourages students to avoid imitating
only one orator or one style; instead, he argues that they should experiment
with imitating many styles. Furthermore, in choosing the models whom they
wish to imitate, students should be careful, he warns, to take note of their own
faculties, talents, and purposes, for it is a waste to expend one’s energy in try-
ing to accomplish what is not suited to one’s talents. Additionally, it is a waste
of those faculties and talents one might have for other accomplishments.
Finally, students should be aware, he says, that not every quality, even in good
authors, should be imitated. Frequently even good authors have blemishes
in their work, which should not be repeated and magnified by an imitator,
and often times works must be adapted to fit the appropriateness of the cur-
rent moment (10.2.14–27).18 Quintilian’s work, and the work of other scholars
of rhetoric before him, reveals an awareness of the importance of imitation
116 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

pedagogy, and this awareness is also in evidence in subsequent pre-twentieth-

century works on rhetoric.
Imitatio next received sustained attention in classical scholarship in 426
a.d., when it appears in the fourth book of De Doctrina Christiana by St. Augus-
tine, a work in which it is suggested that the authors of Holy Scripture are the
best models for eloquence. Augustine was writing at a time when the Church
fathers were in doubt that pagan rhetoric could serve the needs of the new reli-
gion (this despite the fact that many of them, including Augustine himself, had
been trained in, and had often taught, traditional rhetoric). Their suspicion of
rhetoric was borne of their concern for the pagan influences of Greco-Roman
culture, and it was a suspicion Augustine was able to address, in some fashion,
by advocating the imitation of scriptural writers (though his advocacy was
mixed with his sense that much of scripture lacked eloquence).
Augustine begins by arguing that “men of quick intellect and glowing tem-
perament find it easier to become eloquent by reading and listening to eloquent
speakers than by following rules for eloquence” (4.3.1).19 He rhetorically ques-
tions, “as infants cannot learn to speak except by learning words and phrases
from those who do speak, why should not men become eloquent without being
taught any art of speech, simply by reading and learning the speeches of the
eloquent and by imitating them as far as they can?” (4.5).20 In support of this
argument, he points out that many learn to become great orators without ever
knowing the rules for rhetoric, yet no one becomes eloquent without having
had access to great models of eloquence.
For Augustine, the writers of scripture provide the ultimate models for
emulation, in that they unite eloquence with wisdom and do so in a way that
indicates that their words are not sought out but seem, rather, “spontaneously
to suggest themselves” (4.6).21 In imitating these models, potential orators must,
writes Augustine, do several things, among them these: avoid obscurity in favor
of being understood, convey the substance of their thought with clarity, pray
before speaking, use different styles on different occasions (using models from
the scriptures), and, in every style, aim at perspicuity, beauty, and persuasive-
ness (4.26).22 Imitation in all of these things is permissible (and not plagiarism),
Augustine argues, because “the word of God belongs to all who obey it” (4.29).23
The belief that words were to be shared freely continued into the Middle
Ages. It is known that rhetoric survived primarily in three practices, Ars dictami-
nis, Ars poetica, and Ars praedicandi, all of which relied heavily on the practice of
imitation,24 and with the advent of the Renaissance, the practice of imitation
was given renewed and sustained attention. Renaissance humanism, of course,
roughly coincided with both the discovery of many classical and ancient works
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 117

and the invention of the printing press, and so the humanists were avid prac-
titioners of imitation and translation. As Hanna Gray notes, in their pursuit
of eloquence, they interpreted and adapted classical rhetoric, drawing from it
both a body of precepts “for the effective communication of ideas” and “a set of
principles which asserted the central role of rhetorical skill and achievement in
human affairs.”25 Gray writes:

The humanists also assimilated the concepts of rhetoric to precepts of another

nature. The terms “decorum” and “imitatio,” for example, are central in both rhetoric
and moral philosophy, and the humanists often appear to fuse their meanings what-
ever the context. Thus, the imitation of stylistic and of ethical models are spoken of
in identical terms; or the idea of always speaking appropriately, of suiting style and
manner to subject, aim, and audience is treated as the exact analogue of behaving
with decorum of choosing the actions and responses which are best in harmony with
and most appropriate to individual character and principles on the one hand, the
nature of circumstances on the other.26

In the process of imitating texts such as Cicero’s speeches, the scholars of this
period emulated classical styles of writing (sometimes fully incorporating
quotes), used the content as a means of invention (by further inspiration), and
consciously avoided servile and mechanical imitation. In doing so, the human-
ist believed “the liberal arts were to be re-endowed with eloquence through the
imitation of the classical models.”27 To this end, Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of
Rhetorique, the most popular rhetoric in English in sixteenth-century England,
advises his readers to imitate the ways of wise men, suggesting:

Now before we use either to write, or speake eloquently we must dedicate our myn-
des wholly, to folowe the moste wise and learned menne, and seke to fashion, aswell
their speache and gesturyng, as their wit or endityng . . . accordyng to the Proverbe,
by companiyng with the wise, a man shall learne wisedome.28

However, classical texts were not the only models offered for imitation; in 1512,
Erasmus wrote his De Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, in which he
offers a “storehouse” of stylistic possibilities or strategies for coming up with
things to say, going so far in chapter 129 as to offer 150 different ways to write “I
was happy to receive your letter.”29
Despite the renewed attention given to imitation in the Renaissance, due
to influences discussed later in this article, rhetorical studies offered no new
developments to the ideas advanced by early classical rhetoricians, and these
118 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

classical ideals did not receive sustained attention from those in composition
studies until well into the twentieth century.

HISTORY OF COMPOSITION STUDIES

What follows is necessarily brief, as it attempts to survey a period more than

60 years long; it should, however, suffice to contextualize the present state
of imitation pedagogy in American composition studies today. Composition
courses, as they currently exist, grew out of the ancient discipline of rhetoric.
As Robert J. Connors, author of “Writing the History of Our Discipline,” puts
it “the special field of written rhetoric, which came to be called ‘composition,’
grew during the nineteenth century out of the older and more accepted prac-
tice and teaching of oral rhetoric.”30 As the above paragraphs delineate, from
Aristotle during Greek times, to Cicero and Quintilian during Roman times, on
through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the precepts of rhetoric guided
educated men in everything from how to be a good man to how to orate, how
to write letters, and how to construct sermons. To be educated during any of
these times was to be instructed in the art of persuasion. With its five canons of
invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, classical rhetoric ensured
that the educated man could play an important part in the life of the polis. In
tracing the rise and fall of classical rhetoric, Edward P. J. Corbett explains that
“for extended periods during its two-thousand-year history, the study of rheto-
ric was the central discipline in the schools.”31
However, after it enjoyed considerable popularity during the eighteenth
century (when it diverged into such varied studies as stylistic rhetorics, the
elocutionary movement, belletristic rhetorics, and psychological-philosophical
theories of rhetoric),32 it began to lose its place at the center of education during
the nineteenth century. Ironically, this coincided with major growth in student
enrollment at colleges in the United States, colleges where, by the end of the
nineteenth century, “one major component—and one particularly well suited
to a burgeoning information economy—was instruction in writing.”33 Concur-
rently, as Connors notes, “Departments of Rhetoric became Departments of
English Literature and Rhetoric, or simply Departments of English.”34 Girard
himself explores the emergence of literature departments in his article “Theory
and Its Terrors,” in which he notes that although most of us take these depart-
ments for granted, “they do not go back very far; they are relatively recent cre-
ations.”35 As a result of the changes in departmental status, as Connors describes
it, “belletristic scholarship came more and more to dominate the activities of
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 119

these departments, and the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the
institutionalization of the present two-tier literature/composition system in
most English Departments.”36 Often relegated to second place in English lit-
erature departments, composition was increasingly taught by those with little
knowledge of or interest in rhetoric. As such, much of what classical rhetoric
had to offer, including imitation pedagogy, was either unknown or neglected,
and, on the whole, there was not much scholarship about it in the field of com-
position studies beginning in the nineteenth century.
This began to change, as Connors points out, during the 1930s and 1940s,
and most of the change originated at the University of Chicago, where scholars
such as Richard McKeon, Richard Weaver, Edward P. J. Corbett, and Wayne C.
Booth began reintroducing classical rhetorical theory into composition stud-
ies.37 Later, in 1962, P. Albert Duhamel and Richard E. Hughes introduced their
work, Rhetoric: Principles and Usage, a writing textbook largely dependent on
classical rhetorical tenets. Subsequently, most of those who study the history
of rhetoric have pointed to the 1963 Conference on College Composition and
Communication (CCCC)“as the first gathering of the ‘modern’ profession of
composition studies.”38

ENTERING THE DISCOURSE OF THE UNIVERSITY

Before looking more closely at the place of imitation pedagogy in this “modern”
profession of composition studies, I think it is essential to focus on exactly what
those who teach composition (as well as the universities that employ them) are
expecting from their students. And to do so, it is necessary to look at what is
happening at our universities at the professional level. As Girard describes it, the
imperative to publish, and to publish material that will “revolutionize the field,”
ensures that those who teach in universities, although living in a world marked
by consumerism, are bent on production. “We are under a strict obligation to
write, and therefore we hardly have the time to read one another’s work,” Girard
remarks; as a result, “the demands of an academic career are incompatible with
the requirements of a meaningful intellectual life.”39 There is simply no time to
read widely the works of others, no time to devote careful study to the voices
of the past—the emphasis is on the new, the radical, the paradigm-shifting. It
is my contention that, despite everyone’s best intentions, this same attitude is
foisted upon those in freshman composition classes.
As Marsh remarks, at the end of the nineteenth century, the “general man-
date was to educate, or remediate, incoming students in the art of college-level
120 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

theme or essay writing.”40 and this is, to a great extent, the continuing goal of
most colleges and universities. Yet this goal is not so easily achieved, in large
part, many have argued, because of what it is, exactly, that is being asked of
students. As David Bartholomae so precisely argues in his 1985 article, “Invent-
ing the University, “every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to
invent the university for the occasion. . . . The student has to learn to speak our
language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting,
evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our
community.”41 This is, of course, a lot to ask of a young adult most likely unfamil-
iar with the expectations and conventions of academic discourse.
But this is what is expected every time a composition instructor assigns a
paper in which he expects a student to argue, explain, or describe an academic
topic with which she might be totally unfamiliar, and to direct such a piece
toward an audience (her professor) who knows far more about the topic than
she does, as she is likely quite aware. And, in fact, in many composition courses,
students are asked to try on any number of voices and write knowledgeably
about any number of disciplines, regardless of the fact that they may have never
studied some of them before in their lives. This is complicated by the fact, as
Bartholomae emphasizes, that

to speak with authority they have to speak not only in another’s voice but through
another’s code; and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and
through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom; and they not only have to
do this, they have to do it before they know what they are doing, before they have a
project to participate in, and before, at in least in terms of our disciplines, they have
anything to say.42

Such expectations are only complicated, I argue, by modern views on origi-

nality, innovation, creativity, and progress, and particularly by the way in which
these views are expressed in the academic world. Girard briefly and succinctly
traces the evolution of our modern views in his 1991 article, “Innovation and
Repetition,” examining how the connotations of the word “innovation” were,
until the eighteenth century, “almost uniformly unfavorable,” and detailing how
this negative view of innovation evolved into “the god that we are still worship-
ping today.”43 While, prior to the eighteenth century, innovation was viewed as
akin to heresy, in the nineteenth century to innovate was held in high regard.
If innovation has come to be exalted, it is no surprise that imitation, which
most view as its polar opposite, has come to be viewed negatively. There are sev-
eral reasons why imitation came to be held in low regard during the period Girard
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 121

describes, with most scholars pointing to the birth of the Romantic Movement
and the shift from theology to science and technology as the key factors in its
decline in popularity. This widespread change in attitude toward imitation more
generally was reflected in a change in attitude toward imitation pedagogy more
specifically. John Muckelbauer explains that most link the demise of imitation
pedagogy to “the institutional emergence of romantic subjectivity, an ethos that
emphasizes creativity, originality, and genius.”44 Dale Sullivan concurs, describ-
ing three perspectives in modern times that lead to the lack of appreciation
for imitation, including “the myth of progress . . . the Romantic emphasis on
genius, and . . . the technological mindset.”45 He describes how Edward T. Chan-
ning, who was the third Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard (and who,
significantly, taught both Emerson and Thoreau), opposed imitation, seeing in
it a clear interference with genius. He explains that “the Romantics . . . substi-
tuted genius for invention. For them genius was the possession of an inspired
individualist who sees reality in new ways; a person with genius breaks the old
pattern with fresh insight.”46
The opposition between imitation and innovation makes itself obvious
in a clear tension within composition studies. On the one side there is the
quite popular view of the freshman composition student as one who comes to
academic discourse with a unique voice and a unique potential to contribute
new, original, creative, thoughts to that discourse community. This is a student
whom, it is suggested, professors should embrace as being authentic and,
in some sense, “authorized” to “speak.” Sullivan writes that “in the late 1960s,
theorists like Donald Stewart emphasized the importance of students finding
their authentic voice, a theory that is not entirely adverse to imitation . . . but
many teachers in the late 1960s and early 1970s tried to cultivate individualistic
self-expression alone, not appreciating the power models have to form judg-
ment, a sense of appropriateness, and style.”47 The implication of this view is, of
course, that we should resist trying to mold this student or his writing into one
acceptable form—to do so is to limit his freedom, stifle his creativity, silence
his voice, and otherwise coerce him into becoming a member of an academic
discourse community that he might have no interest in joining. Such unfavor-
able implications of force are, to say the least, unpalatable to most teachers,
especially as they are working today in, as Sullivan describes it, a culture “that
values progress, genius, and technique.”48
In addition to the influences noted above, Robert Connors, in his 2000
essay, “The Erasure of the Sentence” (which looks at the decline in sentence-
based rhetorics),49 points to three other factors that he argues are responsible
for a lack of interest in imitation pedagogy: anti-empiricism, anti-behaviorism,
122 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

and anti-formalism. He gives the least attention to the first, and so I will survey
the latter two here. It is Connors’s contention that part of the reason for the
decline in imitation pedagogy is an increasing distrust in behaviorism among
humanists. Because, as will be described in depth later in this article, most imi-
tation pedagogies depend, in part, on unconscious workings of the mind, many
people viewed syntactic pedagogies as problematical, perceived as they were as
“‘mere servile copying,’ destructive of student individuality and contributory
to a mechanized, dehumanizing, Skinnerian view of writing.” Such exercises,
Connors explains, were seen as “demeaning” to writers and “destructive of
individuality.”50
In addition to being dehumanizing and demeaning, such exercises forced
the students to concentrate on atomistic formal levels—to look closely at the
form of their papers: their paragraphs, their sentences, and even their word
choice. Such attention to form (seen by many as opposed, rather than comple-
mentary, to an interest in content, a tension I examine later), Connor notes,
made “any pedagogy based in form rather than in content . . . automatically
suspect,” despite the fact that “for much of rhetorical history, and certainly for
all of the history of composition, the pedagogical method of taking discourse
apart into its constituent components and working on those components sepa-
rately had been accepted almost absolutely.”51 To devote such attention to form,
it is believed by many, is to neglect the rhetorical situation, the sentence located
in discourse, the purposeful expression of a student’s meaning. It is, in other
words, to prioritize the writing product over the individual’s writing process
and motivations for that process.
The tension between process and product has been a defining one for com-
position studies, with most scholars locating the shift from product-focused
teaching to process-oriented teaching in the early 1970s.52 In the former type of
teaching, as may be obvious, there is a greater concern with the formal aspects of
a completed product, with great attention paid to the construction of sentences
and paragraphs, and no little concern for correctness and clarity. In the latter,
much attention is devoted to the steps a student goes through in producing a
paper, with everything from brainstorming to revising to editing receiving care-
ful study. Those who are teaching process are more likely to devote time to such
exercises as freewriting, mapping, revising, conferencing, and peer-reviewing.
In other words, much is made of invention. Surveying this same period and
writing in 1992, Frank A. Farmer and Phillip K. Arrington point to an explicit
causal relationship between the process movement and the decline in imita-
tion’s fortunes, noting that “in the last few decades . . . we have witnessed dra-
matic changes in how we look upon imitation—changes largely influenced, we
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 123

think, by the ‘process movement,’ with its various emphases on invention and
revision, expression and discovery, cognition and collaboration.” They add that

when Richard Young tells us that current-traditional rhetoric usually stresses ‘the
composed product . . . the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and para-
graphs . . . a strong concern with usage and with style,’ we understand at once that
Young is describing a rhetoric devoted to the teaching of discursive forms. It is
hardly surprising, then, that many advocates of process approaches view current-
traditional rhetoric—and the formalism implied by it—as a lamentable inheritance
from our recent past.53

IMITATION AND INNOVATION

The extant tensions in composition studies—between product and process,

form and content, originality and correctness—can, in some sense, be under-
stood to boil down to a tension, well described by Girard, between imitation
and innovation. And what is most valuable about Girard’s work in relationship
to these tensions is that to apply his ideas to these tensions is, in its essence, to
collapse them, to reveal that they exist on a continuum rather than at a divide.
This collapsing, as I will argue later, can only prove productive for those in com-
position studies. As Girard writes in “Innovation and Repetition,” “our world
has always believed that ‘to be innovative’ and ‘to be imitative’ are two incom-
patible attitudes,” and it is assumed that “innovation is supposed to exclude
imitation as completely as imitation excludes it.” Yet, as he argues so brilliantly
in this piece, “the only shortcut to innovation is imitation.”54
This is a belief that has been echoed by many in composition studies, who
propose that, rather than stifling creativity or independence, to imitate, para-
doxically, provides writers (and especially those new to academic discourse)
with more choice and, thus, freedom. In order to understand the nature of this
paradox, one must both look at the forms imitation pedagogy takes in the com-
position classroom and examine the basic beliefs underpinning their efficacy.
As in Greek times, these exercises tend to concentrate on both analysis and
creation of prose pieces, the latter resulting in either exact copies or new pieces,
and the former drawing the students’ attention to qualities in existing works
that they should either emulate or avoid in their own writing.55
Looking at both ancient Greek pedagogy and current pedagogical practices,
Sullivan categorizes imitation exercises into five different types: memorizing,
translating, and paraphrasing (which he deems “close imitative exercises”), and
124 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

modeling and reading (“loose” forms).56 Ideally, most of the time, any of these
exercises would begin with careful analysis of the model. Frank J. D’Angelo,
for example, in using imitation pedagogy in his classes, has his students read
a model and identify a dominant impression. Then, using both quantitative
analysis and sentence by sentence analysis of important linguistic features, he
draws his students’ attention to those stylistic features he most wishes them to
note and imitate. For instance, he explains, “I have passages from Virginia Woolf
to teach the balanced sentence, from Thomas Wolfe to teach the periodic sen-
tence, Mark Twain to teach seriation, and James Joyce to teach spatial order.”57
Composition instructors do not only focus on style; they may look at such
elements as voice, tone, avoidance of fallacies, or efforts to appeal to a specific
audience. They may also, as Ross Winterowd explains, look more generally at a
piece and consider either its subject matter, its organizational structure, or its
patterns of development.58 The important thing, as many scholars have noted, is
to avoid “servile copying” or “slavish imitation of one model.” Indeed, as Don-
ald Lemen Clark asserts, “the consensus of antiquity was against the continued
or slavish imitation of one model,”59 and, in order for these exercises to be suc-
cessful, William E. Gruber explains, the students must study a wide variety of
distinctive prose.60
It is in the study, analysis, and copying of these prose models, many scholars
argue, that the most important work of composition instruction is done. Time
and again, scholars point to the fact that students truly learn to compose not by
learning the rules but by following the example of others, as Augustine himself
argued hundreds of years ago, asserting that “those with acute and eager minds
more readily learn eloquence by reading and hearing the eloquent than by
following the rules of eloquence.”61 Connors summarizes this point succinctly
when, in surveying the different imitation techniques proposed throughout the
centuries, he notes that they have in common the same end result: all “cause
students to internalize the structures of the piece being imitated.”62 D’Angelo
concurs, asserting that in directing students in imitation exercises, the instruc-
tor allows them to “internalize the formal principles” necessary in the creation
of a prose piece.63 This idea that the physical practice of copying or imitating
the works of others will help students unconsciously internalize the necessary
components for eloquent writing is one that is repeated quite frequently in
composition studies by those in favor of such pedagogy. Such an assumption
implies that the relationship between content and form is one in which the
mastery of the latter leads to the generation of the former.
Addressing those theorists who propose, as Donald Murray does,64 that it is
a myth that formal exercises produce strong content, and those who, like Peter
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 125

Elbow, believe students are better served by teachers who do not force upon
them formal concerns about grammar or style (at least initially) while they are
trying to find their voices, Ross Winterowd denies that such exercises are mere
exercises in style, or form, with little impact on the material or content students
generate. For him, structure or form is key; not only does it “carry meaning,” he
believes, it also forces meaning or, as he puts it, “manner forces matter” or “man-
ner controls matter.”65 He believes, as does Bartholomae, that much of the work
for the composition instructor lies in his/her efforts to introduce or acclimate
students to language or the forms of discourse in order to ensure they have the
tools they need in order to generate content.
In these arguments, then, form leads to content, as imitation exercises
“allow the student to internalize structures that make his own grammar a more
flexible instrument for combining and hence enable the student ‘to take expe-
rience apart and put it together again in new ways,’”66 ways, presumably, the
student would not have had access to before his/her introduction to the uni-
versity. Bartholomae notes that, as unpalatable as it may seem to some, part of
the work of the instructor is to teach the student to “crudely mimic the ‘distinc-
tive’ register of academic discourse before [he/she is] prepared to actually and
legitimately do the work of the discourse.”67 This is to say, the instructor must
teach the student the acceptable and appropriate forms for such discourse. To
see form as generating content is to reevaluate the relationship between imita-
tion and invention.
It is not the case, as many would assert, that imitation and invention or
innovation are at odds; rather, the former leads to the latter. Sullivan points out
that “some modern theorists still advocate imitation or forms of pedagogy that
resemble classical imitation, but the consensus seems to be against it.”68 In large
part, this is because those against it see imitation as working against innovation;
they see the form constricting and restricting both the content and the individual
wishing to express himself. Winterowd would disagree. Rather than restricting
the freedom and individuality of the student, the knowledge and internalization
of forms nurtures these things, for, as he argues, “when the student has internal-
ized a grammatical device, he has also acquired a ‘mechanism’ that can generate
an original thought.”69 And while students may find such exercises as hand-
copying texts word for word over long periods of time, or reading large numbers
of texts, tedious, D’Angelo insists that the more choices a student has, the more
able he is to be inventive; “through copying to copiousness,” he advocates.70
D’Angelo is one of the most ardent supporters of imitation pedagogy, and
one of the best at articulating the relationship between imitation and invention.
He begins his article, “Imitation and Style,” with a paradox: “imitation exists
126 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

for the sake of variation,” and goes on to explain that “the student writer will
become more original as he engages in creative imitation,” which should sur-
prise no one “when we consider the close relationship that obtains between
invention and imitation.” He proceeds to explain how students who come to
a university without “stylistic resources” must expend much time and energy
finding their way through language with which they are unfamiliar, much as
Bartholomae outlines the problems of those new to academic discourse. In
arguing against those who believe students are best left free to discover their
own voice, their own style, their own language, D’Angelo concludes that his
experience in teaching leads him “to believe that nurture, at least in the begin-
ning states of developing a mature style, is better than nature, that a cultivated
plot of ground is better than an untended garden.”71
What D’Angelo, Corbett, Winterowd, and Connors, among others, are
concluding, then, is that rather than setting limits to what students can produce,
imitation exercises, paradoxically, give them the resources to truly express them-
selves in a manner that is appropriate to their new discourse communities and,
thus, their audiences. Those students who are left to their own devices, with
little exposure to a variety of strong texts, are actually disabled by their “free-
dom” from such models. It is here, I think, that Girard’s ideas about humans and
mimetic desire are particularly relevant and illuminating. The ongoing debate in
composition studies assumes that students have a choice about whether or not
to imitate, to mimic the desires and actions of others. What Girard’s work would
suggest is that no one is “free” from mimetic desire, but that this is not necessar-
ily a negative state of being. Rather, our human freedom lies in our ability both
to recognize our mimetic natures and to consciously select those whom we wish
to emulate.
If one accepts Girard’s theory, then one sees that no student comes to the
university as truly “independent,” “original,” or “unique,” but that such a vision
of students suffers from romantic delusions. To then act as if these students, if
given adequate time and encouragement to brainstorm, can generate entirely
original content is to do them (and ourselves) a disservice. J. R. Brink describes
this disservice when he refers to the “paradox of stifling creativity by imposing
the burden of originality [italics mine].”72
The Romantics, from whom this burden seems to have been inherited,
believed, as Girard writes, “that if we gave up imitation entirely, deep in our
selves an inexhaustible source of ‘creativity’ would spring up, and we would pro-
duce masterpieces without having to learn anything.”73 To ignore the fact that
there are thousands of good models for imitation and that there are in fact prac-
tical conventions to academic writing and thus withhold knowledge of these
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 127

models and conventions from students is to deny them the forms they need in
order to “shape language to [their] desires.”74 Such students, I would argue, have
little chance of ever succeeding within the academic discourse community, as
they are not, paradoxically, truly free, as Connors describes it, “to engage in the
informed processes of choice, which are the wellspring of real creativity.”75
The paradoxical relationship between imitation and innovation, between
imitation and freedom, is well described by Girard.76 Girard argues that the pre-
eighteenth-century world abhorred innovation precisely because it conceived
of a “spiritual and intellectual life dominated by stable imitation,” but that in
light of changes occurring with science and technology, transcendental models
were toppled. The world that resulted is one in which anyone may choose any
model or elect not to follow any model at all. This is a world in which to admit
to copying or modeling one’s behavior on a role model is to admit to an unfor-
givable lack of originality and selfhood. Breaking with the past and creating
ruptures, rather than embracing history and tradition, is to be admired in this
current age, when “inconsistency has become the major intellectual virtue of the
avant-garde.”77
What Girard concludes, then, is at odds with this worldview; he contends
that “it is true that the only shortcut to innovation is imitation.”78 With this
statement, Girard collapses the opposition between these two terms, revealing
their relationship to be one that is, in fact, continuous. He explains that “con-
cretely in a truly innovative process, it [the specificity of innovation] is often
so continuous with imitation that its presence can be discovered only after the
fact.”79 Girard does not see innovation as anti-mimetic, and in arguing against
the “modern ideology of absolute innovation,”80 he makes the claim that those
who embrace such an ideology are deceiving themselves. The motivation for
such self-deception he locates in attitudes toward imitation; he explains:

When the humility of discipleship is experienced as humiliating, the transmission of

the past becomes difficult, even impossible. The so-called counter-culture of the six-
ties was a climactic movement in this strange rebellion, a revolt not merely against
the competitiveness of modern life in all its forms, but against the very principle of
education.81

Some in composition studies are not confident that this attitude is going
to disappear anytime soon. In 1971, Corbett, whose text Classical Rhetoric for
the Modern Student includes imitation exercises, pessimistically noted that he
had no serious expectations that such exercises would be popular in the coming
years.82 He explains that “the present mood of education theorists is against such
128 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

structured, fettered training. The emphasis now is on creativity, self-expression,

individuality.”83 I argue that Girard’s voice can be productively lent to a dialogue
about this tension between tradition and innovation, and I strongly agree with
his assertion that

Real change can only take root when it springs from the type of coherence that
Tradition alone provides. . . . The main prerequisite for real innovation is a minimal
respect for the past and a mastery of its achievements [italics mine], that is, mimesis.
To expect novelty to cleanse itself of imitation is to expect a plant to grow with
its roots up in the air. In the long run, the obligation always to rebel may be more
destructive of novelty than the obligation never to rebel.84

Entering into the academic discourse for the first time, freshmen composi-
tion students are entering into an unfamiliar universe, one where there has been,
to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke, an “unending conversation”85 being
conducted, in some cases, for thousands of years. To expect students—in the
course of a semester, or in the best-case scenario, a year—to contribute to this
conversation in ways that are satisfactory to the university without significant
exposure to the works of others and careful study of their formal attributes is
to expect too much. Bartholomae writes that “what our beginning students
need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the
commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of per-
suasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the
‘what might be said.’”86 It is all but impossible for students to do this if imitation
is viewed as “humiliating,” and if form is viewed as divorced from content, imi-
tation as opposed to innovation.
Gruber views incoming students sympathetically. He recognizes that they
are entering a world and a discourse that is unknown and unfamiliar. “Ritual,”
he notes, “enables us to successfully . . . confront the unknown.” Thus, composi-
tion instructors should teach students “to impose some saving organization—a
form—on the chaos of experience.” He further argues:

Offering composition students shapes, or forms, or conventions, to imitate offers

them a saving ritual of self-definition. As always, they write about what they know.
But self-expression is possible only when the self has a defined area to work in. Thus
in imposing form on content students more successfully illuminate their lives, their
personalities, and their values; for themselves, for their peers, and for the people
who read—and grade—their essays.87
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 129

According to Gruber, then, students are unable to define themselves without

being given something to define themselves against. Students need to see
acceptable academic discourse modeled for them; they need to be encouraged
to study this discourse closely as a method of guaranteeing their own successful
entry into it. Much of what Girard has devoted himself to has been the unveiling
of “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” and one of these “things”
is the reality of the “interdividual” nature of humans. Humans are dependent
on one another for their desires; they are never fully individual, and to believe
otherwise, Girard asserts, is to embrace a romantic myth. Since the eighteenth
century, this myth has encouraged a slavish belief in the autonomy, originality,
and spontaneity of individuals. Avoiding this myth requires, in part, under-
standing and embracing what Girard terms the “mimetic model of innovation.”88
Embracing this model, admittedly, requires composition instructors to devote
more time than they might currently have to formal exercises that students may
find tedious, and I am thus not entirely optimistic that this will occur. However,
introducing a consideration of Girard’s thoughts on imitation and innovation
into ongoing conversations taking place in composition studies, I believe, is a
strong first step in reassessing this field’s connection to its rhetorical roots and
shaping the future of its pedagogy in a positive fashion.

NOTES

1. René Girard, “Innovation and Repetition,” in Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and
Criticism, 1953–2000, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008),
230.
2. Girard, “Innovation,” 246.
3. For further treatment of the place of imitation in ancient Greece and Roman times, see the
following strong articles: Richard McKeon’s “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imita-
tion in Antiquity,” Modern Philosophy 34, no. 1 (1936): 1–35; Elaine Fantham’s “Imitation
and Evolution: The Discussion of Rhetorical Imitation in Cicero De Oratore 2. 87–97 and
Some Related Problems of Ciceronian Theory,” Classical Philology 73, no. 1 (1978): 1–16;
and Donald Lemen Clark’s “Imitation: Theory and Practice in Roman Rhetoric,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 37, no. 1 (1951): 11–22.
4. John Muckelbauer, “Imitation and Invention in Antiquity: An Historical-Theoretical Revi-
sion,” Rhetorica 21, no. 2 (2003): 62.
5. Dale Sullivan, “Attitudes Toward Imitation: Classical Culture and the Modern Temper,”
Rhetoric Review 8, no. 1 (1989): 10.
6. George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to
Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 133.
130 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

7. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard
Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 554.
8. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, ed. G. P. Goold and trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 1374b. The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Cary, NC: Oxford
University Press, 2001) edited by Thomas O. Sloane and Michael McGee, offers a succinct
survey of imitation, within which early classical works are covered, including Gorgias’s
Encomium of Helen, Isocrates’s Against the Sophists and Antidosis, Plato’s Phaedrus, Diony-
sius’s Peri Mimeseôs (On Imitation), Horace’s Art of Poetry, and Longinus’s On the Sublime.
As much of what is said in these works is repeated and expanded on more comprehen-
sively by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, this article will focus on the works of the latter
three.
9. Stephen Halliwell, “Introduction,” in Aristotle, The Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 8.
10. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b.IV.
11. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press 1996), 2.22.90.
12. Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1998), 1.Pr.9.
13. The following paragraph is a summary of a schema developed by James J. Murphy in Quin-
tilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of
the Institutio Oration. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987): xxx–xxxii.
14. Quintilian, Institutio, 10.2.11–14.
15. Quintilian, Institutio, 10.2.1.
16. On page 243 of “Theory and Practice,” Corbett is quick to point out that for Quintilian and
other classical rhetoricians, “similar” and “identical” did not have the same meaning; he
explains that “The verb aemulari which is the source of our verb emulate and which in Latin
has remotely the same roots as imitari and imago, would have been a more precise word to
designate what the rhetoricians hoped to accomplish by imitation, since aemulari meant
‘to try to rival or equal or surpass.’” Edward P. J. Corbett, “The Theory and Practice of
Imitation in Classical Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication 22, no. 3 (1971),
244.
17. Quintilian, Institutio, 10.2.5–7.
18. Quintilian, Institutio, 10.1.14–27.
19. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (New York: Clarendon
Press, 1995), 4.3.1.
20. Augustine, De doctrina, 4.5.
21. Augustine, De doctrina, 4.6.
22. Augustine, De doctrina, 4.26.
23. Augustine, De doctrina, 4.29.
24. As James Murphy explains on page 199 of his 1974 Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of
Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974), Ars dictaminis, or the art of letter writing, often took place through the imitation
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 131

of drafted formulas—standardized statements copied and altered according to the needs

of various circumstances. On page 136, he describes Ars poetica as being concerned with
two issues—Ars recte loquendi, or the art of right speaking or correctness in speaking or
writing, and Ars enarratio poetarum, or the analysis and interpretation of literary works—
and students were encouraged to imitate the forms, meters, and figurations of a variety of
poems. Ars praedicandi—concerned with the construction of themes or sermons—was
usually taught using short expository treatments that had sample “sermonettes” attached
for readers to imitate, as Thomas Conley explains on page 96 of Rhetoric in the European
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
25. Hanna Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 24, no. 4 (1963): 498–502.
26. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism,” 506.
27. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism,” 506.
28. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints,
1962), 17.
29. Desiderius Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix
(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1963), 38–42.
30. Robert J. Connors, “Writing the History of Our Discipline,” in An Introduction to Compo-
sition Studies, ed. Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 5.
31. Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1971), 32.
32. See Eighteenth-Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and
Sources (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994), ed. Michael G. Moran, for a
fuller survey of the changes rhetoric underwent during this period.
33. Bill Marsh, Plagiarism: Alchemy and Remedy in Higher Education (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2007), 52.
34. Robert J. Connors, “Introduction,” in Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, ed.
Robert Connors et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 5.
35. René Girard, “Theory and Its Terrors,” in Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and
Criticism, 1953–2000, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008),
194.
36. Connors, “Introduction,” 5.
37. Connors, “Writing,” 9.
39. Connors, “Writing,” 10.
39. Girard, “Theory,” 206–7.
40. Marsh, Plagiarism, 102.
41. David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” in When a Writer Can’t Write, ed. Mike
Rose (New York: Guilford, 1985), 589.
42. Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 600.
43. Girard, “Innovation,” 230–34.
132 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

44. Muckelbauer, “Imitation,” 62.

45. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 15.
46. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 16.
47. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 16.
48. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 18.
49. In order to support his assertions, Connors surveys books and journals in the fields of
rhetoric and composition and finds that from 1960 to 1998, only 22 works were published
on imitation pedagogy (with the most, five, appearing during the years 1971–75. During
that same period, Frank D’Angelo in “Imitation and Style,” College Composition and Com-
munication 24, no. 3 (1973): 290 notes the same lacunae in scholarly work dealing with the
subject, commenting that in searching journals he “could find few articles that deal explic-
itly with imitation,” and clarifying that “only two are concerned with a direct application
of pedagogical principles.” During my own search, I came up with only five, one of which
was written by Connors, who died shortly after its publication (see note 49 below).
50. Robert J. Connors, “The Erasure of the Sentence,” College Composition and Communication
52, no. 1 (2000): 113–14.
51. Connors, “Erasure,” 110.
52. Sharon Crowley discusses this tension in “Around 1971: Current-Traditional Rhetoric and
Process Models of Composing,” in Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and
Change, ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 64–74, offering a good explanation of the forces
underpinning each of these approaches, and making several intelligent suggestions on how
this shift should be viewed in retrospect.
53. Frank M. Farmer and Phillip K. Arrington, “Apologies and Accommodations: Imitation
and the Writing Process,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23 (1993): 12–14.
54. Girard, “Innovation,” 235–39.
55. Corbett explains on page 245 of “Theory and Practice” that looking at prelection is the best
way to understand what occurs during the analysis phase, explaining that “prelection is
merely the Latinate term for the kind of close analysis of a text that teachers today conduct
in the classroom. . . . The elaborate commentary, which sometimes proceeds sentence by
sentence and occasionally focuses on units as small as the word, is designed to expose the
strengths (and sometimes the weaknesses) in selection, structure, and style to be found in
the composed text.”
56. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 13.
57. For those who want a clearer sense of exactly how an exercise in analysis might proceed in
a composition course, D’Angelo’s 1973 “Imitation and Style” offers an extremely detailed
explanation of how he would guide students in the stylistic analysis of a model piece, using
the introductory paragraph of Irwin Shaw’s short story “The Eighty Yard Run.”
58. W. Ross Winterowd, “Style: A Matter of Manner,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 2
(1970): 161.
59. Clark, “Imitation: Theory and Practice in Roman Rhetoric,” 14.
60. William E. Gruber, “‘Servile Copying’ and the Teaching of English Composition,” College
Revisiting Imitation Pedagogies in Composition Studies from a Girardian Perspective 133

English 39 (1977): 491–97.

61. Augustine, De doctrina, 4.4.
62. Connors, “Erasure,” 102.
63. D’Angelo, “Imitation,” 290.
64. See Donald M. Murray’s “Five Myths in the Teaching of Composition” in his A Writer
Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition, (Boston: Houghton, 1968),
210–222, for a fuller discussion of his views on pedagogy and sentence rhetorics.
65. Winterowd, “Style,” 163–64.
66. Winterowd, “Style,” 164.
67. Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 616.
68. Sullivan, “Attitudes,” 15.
69. Winterowd, “Style,” 167.
70. D’Angelo, “Imitation,” 290.
71. D’Angelo, “Imitation,” 283.
72. J. R. Brink, “Composition before Copyright: Renaissance and Modern Views,” College
Composition and Communication 28, no. 3 (1977): 64.
73. Girard, “Innovation,” 244.
74. Gruber, “Servile Copying,” 494.
75. Connors, “Erasure,” 102.
76. Although, in this article, I have primarily tried to argue that Girard’s treatment of the
relationship between imitation and innovation and his views on the Romantic myth of
the self have much to offer composition studies in terms of illuminating ongoing debates
over the value of imitation pedagogy, I do wish to note, briefly, that I believe other debates
in composition studies over teacher authority and the proper relationship (in terms of
“power”) between instructor and teacher would be well served with more consideration
of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. This article has looked specifically at the imitation of
“objects,” in terms of written texts, as my focus has been on the dialectic between imitation
and innovation, but it is important to note that when Girard is speaking of mimetic desire
more generally, he is interested not in the relationship between imitators and objects, but
in the relationship between imitators and models. As such, more work needs to be done
on the way this relationship has been discussed in composition studies. Robert Brooke
and Richard Boyd began this conversation years ago, but there is little sign that it has been
continued. Part of what must be addressed, I believe, is how composition instructors
“invite” their students to join the academic community or embrace traditions, and part of
this discussion invites a consideration of how composition instructors succeed or fail in
encouraging students to find it desirable to be a part of this tradition or community in the
first place.
77. Girard, “Innovation,” 235–37.
78. Girard, “Innovation,” 239.
79. Girard, “Innovation,” 238.
134 Kathleen M. Vandenberg

80. Girard, “Innovation,” 239.

81. Girard, “Innovation,” 242.
82. However, ironically, as Winterowd points out in “Style,” 161, “it is the doctrine of imitation
that provides the rationale for the omnipresent freshman readers.”
83. Corbett, “Theory and Practice.” 249.
84. Girard, “Innovation,” 244.
85. On pages 110–11 of his 1941 book, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic
Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 110–111, Burke, in describing his-
tory, writes: “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have
long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated
for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already
begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for
you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you
have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you
answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either
the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your
ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must
depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
86. Bartholomae, “Inventing the University,” 600.
87. Gruber, “Servile Copying,” 497.
88. Girard, “Innovation,” 244.
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