Richard Weaver: Some main ideas

• rationality is all good and well, but we humans are emotional beings and therefore cannot wholly rely on rationality to meet our expressive ends
• aesthetics are necessary for us to be wholly expressive
• rationality and logic exist in a realm apart from human emotions and sensations; thus inviting the need for rhetoric
• rhetoric combines the power of rationality with the expressiveness of literature
• because of this relationship, all rhetoric is personal, aesthetic, and political because those using rhetoric wish to persuade their listeners to some political ends
• since all rhetoric is persuasive, a speaker must always consider her audience and include this consideration in all aspects of the composition process

Weaver seems to be a little old school here, especially when he claims that all rhetoric is persuasive. I guess it's true that all creation, in some way is persuasive, but his definition is more overt. It seems that he believes politics are always involved, whereas I think that some rhetoric is simply expressive, desiring to evoke an emotional response from the reader/listener that does not necessarily correspond with a political agenda. Of course, there are those who say that politics pervades every aspect of life (that would be, you, Bakhtin), so perhaps Weaver is onto something here.

Starstruck: Some Time with Burke

Coincidentally, we were covering Kenneth Burke in my teaching college writing class the same time I was reading  him for this one.  So, this journal is going to be me telling you an assignment idea I came up with using the pentad.

To get students familiar with evaluating/unpacking sources, they would be instructed on how to use the pentad with its five points (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose).  For the initial assignment, students would dissect a simple , familiar fairytale told in very simple prose (something between 200-500 words).  Then, splitting the class into small groups (2-3 people), they would fill out the pentad.  After giving students some time to work on this, each group would map out their respective pentads on the board with an indication as to which point has the most emphasis.  Then, as a class, students would discuss the differences among the interpretations and why some students saw different points needing emphasis.

Ideally students would realize that texts can be interpreted multiple ways and that no text is entirely objective. They would transfer the skills learned using the pentad and apply them to more complex reading assignments, and perhaps even at some point their own writing.  The pentad is a great way of teaching for many reasons.  It's a flexible, widely applicable strategy, can involve the drawing of stars (with colored pencils if one prefers!), and can help students make mincemeat of complicated texts.

At least, I hope it will work.

Dear Mikhail

Main Idea:

Dialogic = intertextuality, ongoing dialogue, context, conversations are always conversing with conversations that came before them.

Dear Mikhail,

What I first noticed about your excerpts in my rhetoric book is your first name. Now, that may be strange to you, but I'll explain why. I have a rather unhealthy obsession with the television program Lost. Believe it or not, one of the tertiary characters in the series has your first name. And he's Russian! And he lives underground! Ha. Given this, it is no surprise that when I began reading these excerpts I paid less attention to what you were saying than I did trying to figure out how your philosophy folded into the Lost mythos. Because, you see, in drama studies all roads lead to Thebes, but in Sarah Morgan studies, all roads lead to Lost. So, there you have my academic framework for grappling with your language studies.

Ideology seems like a good place to start. You tell me that all language, all signs, in fact, are a reflection and/or refraction of an ideology. I get that: language is communicative, communication occurs in society, society's framework lies in ideology and those ideologies in society establish culture. Basically, you think that language is always subject to ideological boundaries (Sidebar: I also have a feeling that by "ideology" you sometimes mean "government"-- as in restrictive Russian government--so your very communication, this very writing that I'm reading right now, is subjected to the cultural and political power of government. Yes? Maybe?). So, ideological boundaries...you also explain that individual consciousness (IC) can only be found through ideology. Wow, I guess that's kind of true; we can't be self aware if that awareness occurs in a vacuum, but I wonder if the IC can break out of ideological restraints? Can it only leave one ideology for another, perhaps? There is no new ground only new navigation? That is disheartening, but in a way very true.

So how does this apply to Lost? Well, any avid fan (we're all avid fans, you have to be, really, to understand the show) can tell you that each episode, indeed each scene is in a larger conversation with the series as a whole. Meaning can only be made by considering the larger structure of the Lost-universe. I guess it kind of fits then, but I'm not sure that's exactly what the creators were going for when they named the Russian dude Mikhail, but that's what I'm taking from it; that's my utterance on that.

You also said some cool stuff about utterance, sentences, novels, and linguistics. I'm going to make a chart on poster board to sort it all out. I hope you'll like it. Let me know.

-S.

Blurbs from Ginny Woolf

This probably doesn’t have much to do with Woolf’s rhetoric, but I found it important to comment on:

“My dear you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.”
--The Angel in the House

Wow, this angel is still hanging out in my house. Well, I’ve got her caged, but she still squawks at me all the time. I’m a person who’s inclined to be blunt, but that sort of honesty isn’t expected of women, so it’s necessary for us to sugarcoat things. I’m under the impression that if I didn’t, I’d be called a “bitch,” whereas if a man acted the same way he’d be regarded as “hard to please,” and yes please read all the sexual innuendo into that phrase that you wish. At this point, I’m at the angry feminist stage of grappling with my demonic angel. I haven’t killed her yet, I suspect because I want to torture her first. Anyway, back to rhetoric.

On language and writing:

“[Sentence], a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.”

These remarks remind me of Cheris Kramerae’s view on the inadequacy of language for women. Woolf expounds upon this later when she discusses Mary Carmichael’s novel in which the author introduces a lesbian romance (at least as I understand it). Woolf claims that Carmichael’s language is not the best, but it is as good as it can be now. So, Woolf sees language appropriation as a process, one that must be carried out by future generations of women writers. But it’s not just language Woolf is talking about here, like Nietzsche, she’s using language as a metaphor for self expression. Just as women must kill the Angel in the House to be fully productive, fully self-aware, women must break apart the language system and rebuild it anew.

But that’s still using the master’s tools, so I’m not sure it will work, I’m not sure that it has worked.

I Failed Horticulturalsim

I faintly remember being assigned Nietzsche some years ago, for another course. I'm not sure which course it was, most likely one of a political science nature, but I know that I didn't do the reading. Such was the nature of my undergraduate years, especially before I started taking literature courses again.

What I remember about Nietzsche, I'm afraid, didn't work in his favor, because all that I could recall before today was that he said something about God being dead. Well, my indoctrinated, unquestioning self of a few years back, was clearly abhorred and never sought Nietzsche as an acquaintance since then.

Alas, things are quite different now. I'm reading through these selections, from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and I find myself wanting to underline and comment on nearly everything! Basically, Freddie's like, Truth and labels are arbitrary, nothing is absolute, everything has been socially and culturally constructed. In a modern sense, these claims may not be particularly relevatory to you. But take it from me, someone who's been wading through the icky, uppity, structured, and absolutist 19th century rhetors, that Nietzsche is on to some cool shit. Here's one of my favorites. I just want to eat these words all day:

Truths are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

While these words are certainly scathing, especially to the ears of the moral poiltical right (and dare I say Christian activists?), I think we should take a step back and contextualize. Nietzsche develops his argument, basically, by using language as a metaphor for how culture relies on signs, on agreed upon symbols, on arbitrary meaning. The only problem is, we've begun to treat morality and truth as absoloutes; we no longer question them, interrogate their meanings, their histories, their own contexts.

Paradoxically, I am a firm believer in not being too dedicated to a cause because complete immersion oftentimes leads to blindness and neglect. So, I'm rolling right along with Nietzsche when he questions these "truths." Meaning has to come from somewhere, right? Some find it in the stars, some in religion. What I think Nietzsche was trying to get it, is that we all need to think for ourselves, we need to stop relying prepackaged labels to explain the world around us. Take, for instance, this one example, he points out:

We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments!

He goes on to explain how these "arbitrary assignments" are also dependent on power, (though in this particular sample, he does not discuss power in the same realm as maybe Foucalt and Bakhtin do), in that differences are often labeled or designated as weaknesses, as in an inability to conform, to perform. Yep, that certainly sounds familiar. I feel like Judith Butler is sitting beside me and tapping her insistent finger along the margins of Nietzsche's rhetoric. I'm looking, Judy! I get it!

Richard Whately and Moral Absolutism

The first thing you'll probably notice about Richard Whately is that he has an incurable man-crush on Aristotle. While Whately attributes most of his fascination for the early philosopher to Aristotle's nearly infallible grasp of reasoning, you will also quickly notice that Whately sees a lot of himself in the ancient theorist. While my knowledge of the history of rhetoric is cursory at best, the particular anthology I'm reading (The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., Eds. Bizzel and Herzberg) offers a concise and well-written introduction that has helped me start connecting the dots, so to speak. As with the development of most theories, philosophies, etc., rhetoric follows a reactionary ebb and flow wherein one generation's proclivities are succeeded by the next generation's rejection of those same proclivities, creating schisms, splits, re-developments, and re-definitions along the way.

Though Whately was active in the early 19th century, he is very much a classicist. He adores and utilizes the texts of ancient Roman and Greek orators and philosophers. This, combined with Whately's own protestantism (he was a clergyman, in fact), makes much of his views on rhetoric and argumentation problematic. Most noticeable is Whately's dependence on moral absolutes (something the editors' introduction makes note of), and his further claims that a skilled rhetorician, as long as he speaks the truth, will win out in the end. This claim is even further complicated by Whately's repetitive emphasis on sound reasoning. Indeed, Whately asserts that where most rhetoricians fail is in their faulty grasp of logic. Yet, Whately's own source of logic is bound to the notion of absolute truth (I should point out that the footnotes indicate Whately pulled some of this view from Aristotle, whose own definition of "truth" is as platitudinous as the devotee's).

"Truth" for Whately depends largely on Christian morality, which perhaps in the context of this writing is not entirely problematic, but history easily shows that "Christian morality" has been used to propagate social immoralities as unethical as slavery (see: Edmund Ruffin's The Political Economy of Slavery) and sexism (see: Anything written by the apostle Paul). Furthermore, Whately's position assumes a universality that to a modern reader seems wholly faulty and, frankly, deviously presumptuous. Of course, I do not expect entirely ethical or inclusive writings from an 18th century pastor, but I do expect more sound reasoning from a rhetor who claims that reasoning is the basis for all successful rhetorical endeavors.

If there is one lesson I embrace from Whately's writing, it is his insistence that in order to be a successful orator/writer, one needs to be a language expert. Whately makes various comparisons to tools and labeling, but largely he reasons that language is how humans communicate and a sophisticated understanding of language will enable one to create a more effective message. Of course, Whately's definition of language depends on the aritsocracy's language and students' ability to emulate the forms of those who hold economic and social power. I'm guessing someone like Anzuldua would have a lot to say about Whately's assumptions, and none of them very nice, but I find myself oddly at ease with these claims, for it anticipates the modern composition rule "know your audience," and knowing one's audience is greatly concerned with understanding and utilizing that audience's language (be it MLA-laced academic prose or jargon-infused technical writing). So, if I were to translate Whately's insistence on linguistic expertise, I would say that a "good" writer would be able to wield multiple tools at once and know which tools were appropriate for particular circumstances.