Rhetoric and Rhet/Comp

     It's like going home, reading the cultural rhetoric pieces.
     Last semester I felt like I was crazy, not only because of all the work and lack of sleep, lack of exercise, lack of interaction outside of a classroom, but also because the literary realm has become unfamiliar territory. I kept asking myself, "So What?" I mean, it is lovely and ( oh how I hate this word ) interesting to do readings of what the text means or says about the world but then what?

     What is the purpose of all this? To become better human beings? I'm not sure that reading Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop--or even reading them in tandem--will help me do that. This is where rhetoric comes in, I suppose. We assume that the artists want us to learn something so that we'll do something. To what end?
     Perhaps I am having a crisis of faith in the goals of liberal education, those goals I have held firm since the first time I criticized my mother for watching soap operas when she could be learning (age 4, I think). I am 24 years old. It may also be that here, in Boston, in a (more) diverse setting, in a larger population, I have become uncertain that the motive to "save" the world one student at a time through recognizing ideologies is worth the effort. I still believe that texts change people. Now it has become a question of Mass (pun intended). The strange, cliched ideas that we are all here to help each other (!?!) and that making a difference in even one person's life is worth it (?!?) don't seem to be enough.
     I keep watching the death tolls rise in Iraq, and want to scream that it's all because of rhetoric. I feel responsible, somehow, for the duping of the conservatives. Liberal guilt with a twist: I feel that if I had taught enough, or if someone like me had, then this wouldn't have happened. I know that isn't true. But since when did knowing that it's not my fault help?
     Why go on to a PhD? In my personal statements, I went with the "save the world" thing--to teach and to learn. To analyze and to compare notes. To not feel so alone in this endeavor of teaching by becoming a fully legitimated member of the academy. I had such a hard time writing it because I was second guessing my motives the entire time: Why study rhetoric? Why teach it? Why can't I decide which version of rhetoric I want to be a part of--the Rhetoric of Speech Communication Studies, or the Rhetoric of Rhet/Comp? Why do they have to be different? They are both concerned with how discourse is used to gain power and to connect a reader and a writer. Isn't that part of understanding a piece of literature, of understanding what it means? Of becoming a better human being through reading? In order to understand what it means, we must also know how it means. So why is the Rhetoric of Comm departments different from the rhetoric of Comp departments? Or rather, How? Where does this desire to separate come from? Aren't we done with distinctions like that?

And once I am legitimated, can I change departmental politics? Will I even want to by then?