Wednesday's rhetoric pleasures

Please read the Covino article posted up on the D2L – under Magic and Rhetoric.

Like Perelman, Covino is trying also a sort of rescue of rhetoric, and as you read, I’d like you in particular to point out the “rhetoric” that Covino wants to oppose: what are its features? And how is his approach to rhetoric different from that? This sort of distinguishing of a “new” rhetoric from an “old” was a central task of the generation of rhetorical scholars in the mid-20^th century – Covino would count as the tail end of that – but of course the academic move itself is a kind of topic of the old and the new, in which the new is better than the way we define the old.

Also, for Wednesday, please come ready to discuss an idea or an issue about rhetoric that you have found interesting or engaging or provocative. (Think in terms of concepts, terms, applications, etc.) Do some writing about this, that you bring to class. We’ll use this to begin talking about the final work of the semester.  Take a look at this website here, as well, for some varied definitions of rhetoric – they might help direct your thinking:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricdefinitions.htm

Perelman and rhetoric

I've uploaded a Chaim Perelman piece called "The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning," up to D2L. Please bring a copy of this to class on Monday - it's dense enough that we'll take a couple of days to work through it, but please try to read it by Monday. I'd like you to come to class with three questions about things you don't understand, written down and ready to ask - that's where we'll begin in class.

Perelman came to rhetoric, as you will see in his piece, because he needed a way to create logical arguments that could support value judgements.  On the one hand, he came to believe that demonstration, which you can think of in the same category as a mathematical, scientific, or philosophical proof, could never "prove" the truth of a value judgement. On the other hand, he was not willing to accept a relativist position claiming that all "truths" were equal.  After initially stating that there were no ways to defend value judgements logically, he went looking for a method, and he found one in in Aristotle, though it took some tweaking.

Perelman was especially interested in epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame, because that sort of rhetoric depends on audience buy-in to certain kinds of values. In forensic rhetoric and deliberative rhetoric (as you'll remember, judicial and political), the arguments are about fact. In epideictic rhetoric, the arguments are about values. Furthermore, the success of the argument depends on the rhetor and the audience agreeing with the same sort of value judgements.

For Perelman, one of the major tasks of the rhetor is to frame an argument in a way that begins from a point of agreement with the audience (you'll see the connection here to the idea of stasis). If rhetoric is going to work, that is, the starting point of its work must be a place of agreement. That place can be based in truths or in fact or in presumptions - already agreed to by the audience (in the case of truths and fact) or opinions you don't need to defend (like, "We shouldn't discriminate on the basis of race," a presumption in our era that in not so recent eras would have been exactly opposite) - facts and truths are thus a little more solid and less likely to change over time than presumptions.  But that place of agreement can also be based in what Perelman calls "values, hierarchies, and the loci of the preferable." It's his exploration of values, and the way that he leans on epideictic rhetoric, that's the "new" in "new rhetoric."

That's a fast and dirty intro means to ease you into it - when you read, don't pummel yourself for not understanding some parts - instead, pay attention to two aspects as you read: 1) what makes sense to you as you read it? How can you use that to help understand larger ideas in the piece and 2) what is it you don't understand? My point with that question is that you identify as specifically as possible the aspect of whatever you read that is confusing you - that part will likely be the basis of the 3 questions you bring to class on Monday.

Have a good weekend.

Mea Culpa

Hello ya'll -

Though I have many things that I could list in what is turing out to be a semester unlike any that I have experienced as a professor, I won't go ahead and do that, because it sounds too much like an excuse, and I don't want to do that. I promise you that I will read the election rhetoric projects carefully and closely - what I have read in that way already has been rewarding. But you deserve a much faster read of them than I have been able to do, for afore-hinted-at-reasons that I refuse to use as excuses. Basically, I am sorry. I hope you'll be patient, and I'm grateful for the engagement I've been seeing, and having, all semester from you. It is truly the case that my favorite times of the week this semester has been in my two classes.  I am not stopping, but neither is anything else. Thanks for your understanding, if you are understanding; if you're not understanding, I understand that too, of course.

Visual Rhetoric

For Monday, I'd like you to do a short research project (emphasis on short) in which you track down at least one peer-reviewed source (i.e. it has been refereed and vetted for quality by people who know the field, like an essay in an academic journal) that can help you address the question of what we should take into account when we use the term visual rhetoric.  In a sense, we're looking for works toward a definition of the concept.

Please post the citation (and if possible a link, but don't sweat that too much) to your blog by Monday, and come on Monday ready to talk about issues connected to visual rhetoric.

Trees and students

At this point, the only hope for the grove of trees immediately to the north of Wilson Hall is that students will become outraged at the destruction of a 100-year old stand of trees. The President listens to students. If you haven't heard, here's the story:

http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/montana_state_university/article_c9eed5e6-1816-11e2-b464-001a4bcf887a.html

Just sayin'.

For Monday Oct. 22

Hello. I have posted two articles to the Desire to Learn page (I can't write D2L again, somehow). They explore the idea of rhetorical situations - the first is called, simply, "The Rhetorical Situation," and the 2nd "The Rhetorical Situation and its Constituents." Please read these two pieces by Monday. And, to your blog, please write about a particular rhetorical situation you have responded to in your own life, using some of the terms that Bitzer and Grant-Davie introduce.

Again

Alas - those in class on Friday, of course, knew this: others did not. Please bring something material and concrete to class today regarding the assignment due on Friday. I mean, that is, some writing.

Debate reflection

Post an entry to your blog reflecting on the debates last night, thinking about them from a rhetorical perspective.

Presidential rhetoric assignment: part one

“I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a diversion to myself.”

            Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen”

Gorgias began the semester with an important announcement: in one light, rhetoric is a puzzle, a sort of mental toy. The start our play – ala Aristotle - by carefully considering what we might say, what it is possible to say, and continues by figuring out the best parts of that to use to address these people, in this place, at this time.

For this assignment, I want you to take a text, a series of texts, or a central aspect of the Presidential campaign (or a related topic) and apply in a focused way one or more of the concepts and principles we’ve engaged so far this semester. My interest in this assignment is that you try out, in a comprehensive and detailed way, analyses based on the ideas we have explored this semester.

Before you write, take Aristotle seriously: sit down with your text (or texts, or whatever it is you are working with) and with the rhetorical concepts we’ve taken up, and work through them. Look closely at topics, at modes of appeal, at argumentative strategies. Ask questions about the things you find. If you note that an advertisement seeks to make the audience angry, explain how it does that. (This doesn’t just mean saying, “The ad seeks to create a sense of anger by showing how the candidate’s incompetence caused a financial disaster.” Further, you’ve got to consider the question “Why did the creators of this ad know that this topic would make this audience angry?” In other words, keep pushing your answers.)

That’s stage one, and it’s due by Wednesday Oct. 3. These are notes, the finding out, the pre-writing.

Stage two will continue the invention part: invention never stops (another thing that sets it apart usefully from pre-writing, by the way: by definition, pre-writing stops when writing begins). Stage two is where you look at what you came up with and start thinking about what you can say using it, given what you have seen in it, and ask these questions of it: how can you write this piece in a way that will engage readers because it is 1) saying something interesting and worth saying, and 2) trying to engage readers.

The audience is, of course, us. I grant that the entire exercise is completely driven by the rhetorical situation of the teacher-mandated writing assignment, but once we’ve gotten past that, I’m not so interested in “what I want.” I’m more interested in your sense of what we want. Part of your job, as a rhetor, is to appeal to us. Now, the questions you asked about one text (& etc.) become questions you ask about your text. It’s a construction job, and it requires that you think about how to appeal to us.

Style and stylistic terms

For Monday, I want you to pay attention to stylistic choices as another aspect of your analysis. As part of this assignment, do two things. First, browse through this website: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ - on the right side of the page, under "flowers," you'll see a list - endless - of figures of speech. I want you to mess around in this list and identify from it four figures of speech that you find interesting, and then I want you to write a sentence or passage reflecting each of those figures of speech. Then, I want you to think about the stylistic choices within the text or texts you are analyzing, and remember that we'll need to think about style in part in visual terms too.

Failure

Not me - but my goal: Fail. I have not commented on all your blogs by class today.

But I love reading your blogs and your entries - they are compelling and at their best they are eager. Please go through the blogs this weekend and read through entries within them and comment. On Monday, I want to have a conversation about what you're seeing on the blogs, about what is interesting, confusing, provocative, etc.  What we talk about will depend on what you are ready to say about them, so be specific and be ready to point us to particular blogs.

I am still moving forward!

Present resentment

I am really starting to hate those little number and letter combos I have to type in that window - about 50% of the time incorrectly - every time I post a comment.

Enthymemes, signs, maxims

One of the things I want to get you accustomed to doing is trying stuff out - trying out concepts and applying them to actual texts. You've started doing this, but I want to encourage an even higher degree of specificity in your analyses - that is, when you write about a particular feature in a particular text, I'd like to see you include examples and some discussion of why you think that's there. It's the only way, in the end, that you'll get a clear handle on these concepts, or at least a grasp of how they might be useful both as tools for reading and tools for composing.

So, I want you try out, specifically, the concept of enthymeme, again applied to a particular text surrounding the campaign. What I want you to do, that is, is identify a place in a text where you see an enthymeme, and discuss it. That means you'll need to identify the premise or premises made visible, as well as the premise or premises left out - it's kind of a fill in the blank exercise, but the blank is hidden.

You might try out some of the other categories Aristotle suggests as well, like paradigm (example) and maxim. Again, the degree to which these concepts will give you a new perspective on texts and discourse is the degree to which you use them to do focus on specifics in a complex way.

So - write this on your blog by Friday, and come ready on Friday to talk about it in class.

Aargh

Sorry - I didn't post the assignment for today, and it's now today, and we meet in a few minutes. I hope that you proceeded anyway, using my explanation in class on Wednesday, but here's what I was asking:

Aristotle offers a comprehensive listing of both specific topics (that is, the various ways of making arguments connected to deliberative, judicial, and epideictic rhetoric) in Book I and common topics (arguments that are connected across kinds of arguments) in  Book 2 chapter 23. What I want you to do is begin to analyze your piece of presidential rhetoric according to the topics he presents. So, for example, Aristotle lists many questions about the advantageous in Book I chapter 6. How do you see arguments about the advantageous appearing in the text you are analyzing? The more specific you can get here, the better, as you work through these.

What you're doing, as you identify these issues, is sort of the reverse of what Aristotle is presenting them for. Aristotle sees these topics - as I read him - as a method of analysis, a method of asking and considering an issue from a variety of perspectives. What we'll want to start identifying as we consider these issues is what sort of topics we see coming up on a regular basis.

Topics, it might be useful to remember, appear in two forms: there is the "rhetorical syllogism," or enthymeme, and there is the example, or the sign - essentially we're looking at the difference between deduction and induction, respective: the enthymeme relies (usually) on a deductive process, and the sign or example on induction. So, when you're looking for topics, you're looking for the basis of the claims being put forth in the text, the ways in which those claims are defended, which includes both evidence and the reasoning process.

You'll work through Book II next week, and for Monday I'd like you to have read Chapters 1-17 of this Book. These are about emotion - pathos - and I'd like you to explore the ways in which you see pathos at work in the text surrounding presidential rhetoric you are examining. Please write about this on your blog as well, being as specific as you can be.

We're sort of working through steps of rhetorical analysis, using Aristotle as our guide, and getting comfortable asking particular questions about texts as a way of breaking them into categories and parts. Our categories will grow as we move beyond Aristotle, but his categories will always be relevant as well - we'll just continue to expand on them. When you do a rhetorical analysis, of course, you don't have to work through every single category - at least in the final text - but a comprehensive rhetorical analysis will certainly have as part of the process of invention a careful questioning of the text at hand, just to see what you notice and how it works in those texts. So part of what I want you to do here is become comfortable with these steps.

For Friday

Your assignment for Friday is to read all the questions that appear in the class blogs and respond to three of them. Please go back to your own blog as well, and, to the degree that you can, add to the responses that your classmates have left on your blog. In your responses, please make direct reference to passages or ideas from Gorgias. 

We'll begin reading Aristotle for next week, and as we do, we'll add to our discussion of the ethical issues surrounding rhetoric some technical issues. That is, we'll start exploring some basic terminology around rhetoric that we'll need to understand about over the course of the semester. To that end, for Monday's class, please read the Kennedy's Introduction and Chapters 1-8 of Book I for Monday. Come to class with notes and questions (you don't need to post those to the blog this time, just have them with you.)

Also by Monday, please post to your blog one text from the present presidential campaign, either embedded or as a link. This can be the written text of a speech, a campaign ad, something connected to one of the National Conventions, or anything else connected to the campaign that you find interesting. In your blog entry, please explain why you chose it.

For Wednesday

I posted, and then it disappeared! So my second one will be shorter. In any case, it was late already, so sorry. I figured you had enough to read, at least:

For Wednesday, come with notes from Gorgias that identify the major criticisms Plato (via Socrates) levels at rhetoric - be ready to think through the his reasons and your reactions to them. Also, write a question about something you don't understand within the text.

We're opening the semester getting a broad outline of some of the ethical issues surrounding rhetoric, because we'll return to them this semester. But we'll also be turning to politics soon, and these questions will remain front and center.

I'll write some more tomorrow about Gorgias; let me know if you have any questions or concerns about anything related to the class. I always appreciate feedback that lets me change how things are going.

Do Like Carson

Hey - check out Carson's introduction over at Blog Cabin. Of course that's what you all need to do, and I'm glad Carson assigned it. So please: introduce yourself.  You can do it over the weekend, but before Wednesday.

Here's me: I'm in my 11th year, now, as a professor at MSU. Before that, I taught for four years at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. I did my graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I lived for ten years. As of a few months ago, I've lived in Montana longer than anywhere else in my adult life (which would never work as a slogan if I were running for public office here).  I've ended up teaching since I was a freshman at Marquette University, where I tutored students at the Milwaukee Urban Day School - since then, I've taught at MSU, KU, UW, I've taught adult literacy at the Goodwill Community Literacy Center in Seattle, Adult Basic Education at a vocational school, I ran a writing workshop in a county jail in Lawrence, Kansas for two years, and I taught for a year at a Christian university (Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana) in the center of Java in the most Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, as a Fulbright Scholar, two years ago. I like teaching, and my scholarship has mostly been about teaching, focused in large part on literacy studies - I'm especially interested in the ways the idea of literacy works rhetorically (it's always good, for the most part; put the word 'literacy' in front of something, and everyone thinks it is wonderful. You can get away with a lot if you use the right words...) One thing I've had to learn from teaching in so many places is that you better have a back-up plan, because what works in one setting never works quite the same way in another.

You met one of my heckling children, Graham. His older brother Seamus would have heckled me too. My wife Laura has also been known to heckle me. The point is, I can take it, so heckle away...

My scholarship now is on the history of the literacy test as an obstacle to vote (another place where the idea of literacy managed to prop up a deeply racist method of disfranchisement). I also write about the history of the Highlander Folk School (which is now the Highlander Research and Education Center) and I've been trying to write about my year in Indonesia - that's been harder, though.

I've always loved teaching about rhetorical theory. Rhetoric provides a unique window on language as a tool of action, as a way of getting things done. As soon as you let go of the idea that language can ever be an accurate representation of reality, every single thing that gets put into words ends up getting slippery. Rhetoric provides a magnificent way of engaging the paradoxes language lives in. I'm almost certain to enjoy myself this semester - I'll try to make it as pleasant as possible for you too.

I look forward to reading your introductions!

Gorgias and Plato

For Friday's class, I'd like you to go into the blogs of your classmates and find their questions about Encomium of Helen by Gorgias - pick three of these and respond to them in the comments of the individual blogs. The point isn't that you "answer" them - you may be as unclear about the issue as the blog writer is; rather, I want you to engage and explore them, suggesting possible approaches or even validating the complexity of the question by spinning off with other questions.

On Friday, we'll come at some of those questions directly, and we'll talk a bit about the larger questions about rhetoric and truth that the Sophists raised. As you read and think about Gorgias, you should also think directly about how you understand the relationship between language and truth, between language and reality, and what sort of expectations you have for discourse and argument to reflect what is "real" or "true."

The Sophists also were teachers - as I mentioned, this text represents a kind of argument for students to hire Gorgias for a rhetorical education.  Already this made them suspect in some people's eyes - you know how shady teachers are, of course - and add to that the fact that what they taught were ways of persuading people, ways to use language that could sway an audience, and you can see the problem, perhaps. It's like advertising to teach people about advertising, for money, at least from one perspective.

Also, for next Wednesday, I want you to read Plato's Gorgias, and you might want to start early because it is fairly long. It opens just after Gorgias has given a display of oratory in the house of Callicles, when Socrates shows up, late. Gorgias has a follower of his with him (Polus) and Socrates has one of his students (Chaerephon). This is a dialogue about the value of rhetoric, with Socrates working through the several participants one by one, beginning with Gorgias.  At the heart of this dialogue are several critical questions about rhetoric, such as:

• What is its use? Is it "good" to exercise rhetoric? What does it mean to teach people to be more convincing than experts on a subject?
• What sorts of things can rhetoric convey? Truth? Knowledge? Belief?
• Is rhetoric a moral enterprise?

This is, in effect, an attack on rhetoric, and you'll see in the basic formula giving rhetoric the bad name we noticed it had in class on Monday. 

I'll follow up with a more specific assignment around Gorgias following our discussion on Friday.

Welcome and first assignment

Hi everyone. Welcome to English 450. I'll use this blog to update and post assignments and reflections, and I'll link from it to the blogs I'm requiring you to keep this semester as well. That's your first assignment, in fact - go to the upper corner of this web page and click on "create blog." There, you'll get a set of instructions about how to set up a blog. (If you are more comfortable with another blogging service, please use that instead.) Give it a title, at least. Then, do the next part:

 I'd like your first entry to be about about the things your writing teachers have recommended you do before you start writing - pre-writing, some teachers call it. What kinds of exercises and activities did they recommend? What did they call it? What were the goals of pre-writing activities?

UPDATE: I forgot that there is a version of the Encomium of Helen in our course text (On Rhetoric by Aristotle) - that appears on page 283 - please use this instead, if you get this notice in time! - that overrides the link in the next paragraph!

(****Also, I want you to read Encomium of Helen by Gorgias, a text by an early Sophist.)

 Please write down at least one question about something you did not understand, and include that question in your first entry as well.

After you've posted your first entry to the blog, send me the link and the title. Please have this finished  before midnight on Tuesday. I will use your entries in class on Wednesday.