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.