Christensen’s Generative Rhetoric and the Cumulative Sentence

For me the most exciting of the sentence rhetorics of the Golden Age is that pioneered by Francis Christensen. The best place to read his challenging and still relevant work is in the book “Notes Towards a New Rhetoric” which collects his most important writings.

Three of the things he accomplished that are of most interest to me are:

  • He theorised the enlightening notion of a generative rhetoric.
  • He made writing instructors aware of the potential of a form of syntax he called “cumulative sentences”.
  • He created an entire writing pedagogy called “The Christensen Method.” This was available for a time as an apparently rather expensive and intimidating collection of acetates and related teaching materials. I have tried to obtain these. I have failed.

After his death his work was taken up by Donald Stewart who has used the Christensen Method as the foundation of his “Stewart English Programme”. This includes a series of three text books and various teaching materials that are  available on his website as I type. I think Stewart’s work would appeal very much to those wanting to use an approach in keeping with the current vogue for direct instruction. Search out Stewart’s work if this sounds tempting.

But I have got ahead of myself. Let’s backtrack and explore what Christensen’s work is actually about. As usual I will have frequent recourse to writers who have explored this territory before me.

Central to the Christensen method is the notion of the cumulative sentence. He would give his students a very simple sentence starting with a subject/noun and main verb. Then he asked students to add modifying phrases to the simple sentence. He called these phrases “free modifiers”.

For example, he might give a simple sentence like:  The girl walked.

This has a subject/main noun –girl and a verb – walked

This simple sentence is the starting point. Now it can accumulate details in the form of free modifiers. Why “free” modifiers?

He called them this to distinguish them from bound modifiers, like adverbs and adjectives, which fit in specific slots in sentences. (Moran, 2018)

For “free modifiers” think phrases including:

Noun Appositives

Present Participle

Past Participle

Adverbial

Infinitive

Prepositional

Absolute Phrases.

The next key feature of Christensen’s rhetoric is concerned with where the modifying phrases are placed.

Free modifiers – Accordingly the cumulative modifying phrase may open, close or appear in the middle of the sentence.

The initial, medial, final slots. (Landon,2008)

To see in action let’s look at this using the example sentence:

The girl walkd
Initial With a swaggering gait, the girl walked.
Medial The girl, with a swaggering gait, walked.
Final The girl walked with a swaggering gait.

This led Christensen, following John Erskine who he quotes in his essays, to state that the first principle of composition is addition.

“Cumulative sentences that start with a brief base clause and then start picking up new information, much as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill.”  Landon, 2008.

Please permit me the momentary indulgence of a quick flashback to the last blog where we encountered a sentence by P.G Wodehouse:

Here is the main clause:

It played upon me (The narrator is describing the sunlight.)

Wodehouse’s sentence can be read through the instructive lens of Christensen’s teaching. Here is the rest of it:

It played upon me, sitting at a convenient table; on Jeeves, hovering in the background; on the skeletons of four kippered herrings; on a coffee pot; and on an empty toast rack.

What has Wodehouse done? He has added free modifying phrases to his original proposition. Doing this creates the literary effect through the process of addition and repetition of phrases that have something in common (in this case prepositional phrases and present participle phrases). The use of parallelism (repetition of phrases beginning with “on”) creates a pleasing pattern, a literary elegance. The more you read, the more you find that this sort of syntactic play is very common among our greatest writers.

I have spent a lot of my life reading literature, consuming countless novels sentence by sentence. Christensen’s description of generative rhetoric came as a revelation to me. Permit me the melodrama of a quote from Lenin which sums up how I felt “…like a flash of lightning which threw more of a glare upon reality.”  To some extent it felt like Christensen’s theory seemed to explain how literary syntax worked, or at least offer a partial account of the experience of reading literary texts – a phenomenology of literary prose.

The thing is, once you get to grips (or try to get to grips like me) with Christensen’s work the way you read is subtly altered. You start to see cumulative sentences everywhere. Check out this beauty in a short story by Elizabeth Bowen:

Her own person haunted her – above her forehead, the crisped springy weight of her pompadour; round her feet the frou frou of her skirts on a thick carpet; in her nostrils the scent from her corsage; up and down her forearm the glittery slipping of bracelets warmed by her own blood. It is the haunted who haunt.  (Green Holly).

Christensen would probably have regarded this as a “classic” cumulative sentence! Bowen begins with a basic proposition. She then sharpens and develops it with the addition of modifying phrases. In this case a pattern of prepositional phrases.

In Christensen’s essays he makes the point that no existing school textbooks can cope with explaining literary style. Landon even goes so far as to state:

“Cumulative sentences, the syntax at the very heart of teaching writing.” (Landon, 2008).

Christensen’s rhetoric posits a second principle of composition which he calls “levels of generality.”

In order to best explain this I am going to quote from Donald Stewart’s “Stewart English Programme Textbook 3: Writing Plus” –

“As the sentence adds free modifiers, moving from general observations to specific details, it develops a rhythm and a flow. (This can be numbered.)

A level 2 free modifier expands on what has been said in the level 1 base clause modifying the noun, verb, even the entire clause. A level 3 will modify something in level 2. Only the level 1 will be a complete sentence.”  (Stewart, 2018)

This was, for my feeble mind, quite tricky to initially get my head around. When you read Christensen’s work you will see cumulative sentences diagrammed with these different “levels of generality” numbered accordingly. In order to better explain this, here is an example:

He entered the classroom, his head down, his motions jerky, the burden of his self-consciousness as obvious as the jacket he was wearing, a size too large for his small frame.

http://ustudies.semo.edu/gaskins/en140/generative_rhetoric.htm

Here are the different levels numbered:

1He entered the classroom,

2 his head down, (modifies 1)

2 his motions jerky, (modifies 1)

2 the burden of his self-consciousness as obvious as the jacket he was wearing, (modifies 1)

3 a size too large for his small frame. (modifies 2- the new detail of the jacket)

This leads nicely onto Christensen’s third and final principle of composition which is what he calls “direction of movement.”

The modifying phrases have a direction of movement and once again I will rely on someone else to explain this for me:

If the modifying phrase comes before the base clause or to the left of it on the page, it’s called a left branching sentence, if it comes after the base clause or to the right of it on the page, it is called right branching, and if in the middle of the clause, mid-branching.  (Landon, 2008)

This direction of movement accounts for the pleasurable flow of literary syntax that readers often experience when reading. In the long distant past of my undergraduate days I would probably have used the Barthesian term jouissance (incorrectly!) to try and describe this pleasure of the “ebb and flow” of literary syntax. However, it is probably for the best that I let Professor Landon describe this aspect of Christensen’s work:

“The free modifiers point back to the base clause and shift down to a greater level of detail or specificity. They backtrack by picking up and expanding on some aspect of the base clause, giving the sentence as Christensen points out “a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it.” (Landon, 2008)

So that concludes a basic guide to the Christensen method.

Next time: How we are starting to apply Christensen’s generative rhetoric to our five year composition curriculum