Kinneavy: Categorizing Chaos

In the Précis to his presentation Klayton Kendall asserts that James L. Kinneavy’s “purpose [was] to provide a theoretical framework for the field of composition in order to establish it as a discipline worthy of study in higher education.” Kendall develops his ideas by giving the audience background on Kinneavy’s life and on the importance of Kinneavy’s seminal work, A Theory of Discourse. In order to illustrate what he calls Kinneavy’s “desire [for] a unifying theory,” Kendall follows up the background discussion with some compelling video clips, asking the audience to categorize them as Kinneavy might (using the Kinneavy’s “Basic Purposes of Composition:” the Expressive, Referential, Literary, and Persuasive groupings). The purpose would be to impress upon his audience the importance of Kinneavy’s work, with the caveat that even Kinneavy understood no composition could be perfectly categorized into one specific purpose.

The apparent contradictions in Kinneavy’s work are not surprising after reading Thomas P. Miller’s “In Memorial Tribute to James L. Kinneavy.” Miller points to Kinneavy’s “self-deprecating wit” and his “breadth of focus and depth of vision” (313) as an indication of Kinneavy’s grasp of metatheory and its basic precept that “context shapes purpose” (Miller, 314).

Kendall’s thorough backgrounding of Kinneavy’s life – from his elementary school education during the Great Depression, to his college years during World War II, to becoming a member of the Catholic teaching order known as the Christian Brothers – was an essential and important part of his presentation, as it can be seen that Kinneavy’s history certainly “[spoke] to [his] future” (Miller, 316) in the field of composition theory. Growing up in times of such great change and chaos might make anyone yearn for a unifying theory and to find neat categories in which to place ideologies. But, Kinneavy’s “broadly cultural” Catholicism kept his mind open to “understanding traditions as ongoing arguments about the means and ends of [historical] experience” (Miller, 316), allowing him to be fully aware that even his unifying theory could not always hold its center. His self-deprecating humility could then have led him to expose the “contradictions” in his most important work.

Overall, Kendall’s presentation was an informative and interesting glimpse at a man we could spend a lifetime studying and whose work might take several more lifetimes to fully grasp.