Mere Rhetoric

[intro]

Welcome to MR the podcast for beginngs and insiders aboutt he ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren. This last week I graded my students’ rhetorical analyses. For many of them, this was the first time they had been asked to write a rhetorical analysis and this assignment always makes me nervous. I give them sample papers. We practice writing a rhetorical analysis together. We discuss in depth examples and abuses of ethos, logos, and pathos, but many of them struggle tremendously. I know I could write a 3-page rhetorical analysis in 20 minutes; why do my students take hours and still fail the project?

David Bartholomae wondered, as I do, how students approach projects they’ve never been asked to weigh in on before. In my students’ case, they just barely learned what “ethos” is--how are they supposed to assert how it impacts a particular audience? Writing in the early 80s, Bartholomea, like a score of composition scholars like Mina Shanessey and Linda Flower, were interested in the needs of a population sometimes called Basic Writers. Basic writers are those who, in Bartholomae’s words “shut out from one of the privileged languages of public life” in academic writing, although they are “aware of, but cannot control” that language (64). Not having been exposed to reading or writing much of it, they must fall back on what they think academic writing is supposed to sound like. They have to invent what “university writing” is. This is where you have all those errors that make your students sound like robots on the fritz: “utilization,” “the reason for this is because that,” and endless “therefore”s. It impacts big-picture ideas, too. B mentions that commonplaces that many students fall back on: “mistakes are because of a lack of pride,” “creativity is self-expression,” “the text you assignment to read was life-changing and insightful, o teacher mine!” This is where we roll our eyes and feel slightly manipulated, but the students aren’t being malicious when they try to give us what we want--they’re simply not confident at being able to give us what they want, too.

And every time the task changes, students can find themselves flummoxed. “A student who can write a reasonably correct narrative may fall to pieces when faced with a more unfamiliar assignment,” Bartholomae points out. A student can write smooth, error-free prose in a form that makes sense to them, but asked to assume new authority, and they panic in the new register. And who can blame them? They’ve never encountered it before. Imagine being asked to give a public speech in Japanese without knowing the language. Bartholomae’s students were exposed to many of the same forms ours are “test-taking, report or summary--work ...where they are expected to admire and report on what we do” (68). Certainly I saw that in the rhetorical analyses I read. The background research on the author was good, relevant and cited appropriately. The articles were summarized fairly, with occasional quotes from the text. But when I ask them to apply their knowledge of rhetorical terms to argue how the articles were working and they fall to pieces, just as Bartholomae says. Many of them have never been asked to defend their own scholarly opinion or assert another’s through conjuncture. They can’t possibly make a scholarly argument, so instead they are made by it. They put on a mask of “scholar”--”They begin with a moment of appropriation, Bartholomae says, “a moment when they can offer up a sentence that is not their as though it were their own” (69).

But students who are outside of the academic discourses they write also recognize that it is not fair that they have to be outsiders. Even when they are given supposedly non-academic discourse to write-- “explain kairos to a classmate”--students are thrown into assumed authority: how on earth would they explain kairos--they just learned about kairos! They don’t know anything more about kairos than anyone else in the class! It is, in Bartholome’s words “an act of aggression disguised as an act of charity” (65). Being put into a position of insider to which they beleive they have no claim, some students doggedly imitate while others also subtly criticize. “The write continually audits and pushes against and language that would render him [or her] ‘like everyone else’ and mimics the language and interpretative systems of the privileged community” (79).

What is the solution then? Bartholomae suggests that we meet students on the grounds of their own authority--instead of encouraging them to give tidy, pat answers that imitate what they think the professor is looking for, “well within safe, familiar territory” (80). This can seem quixotic, especially when a grade is on the line. While Bartholomea doesn’t give a comprehensive solution, but he does mention the work of Particia Bizzell and Linda Flower as useful starting points--determini...

Weeeeellllcommmme to Meeeeeereeee Rhetoooooric! It’s our annual Halloween episode, which means a little bit of the people, ideas and movements who have shaped rhetorical history, but mostly a ghost story. This year, we’re going with our first not-MR-James story. Don’t worry--there are still intials--but first--to business.

If you’re going to talk about ghost stories and influential thinkers, you won’t dig long until you come across Freud’s contribution, a little piece called “The Uncanny.” You might not peg Sigmund Freud as a connoisseur of boogeymen, but he was capital-f freaked capital-o out by ETA Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.” If Hoffmann’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you know him from writing the story of the Nutcracker ballet. Look at that--our annual tradition here at Mere Rhetoric just founds 3-degrees of separation to every ballet company’s annual tradition! Anyway, the Sandman is a freaky sci-fi horror tale that eventually inspired another ballet called Coppelia. The original is even more terrifying. Don’t worry--it’s coming up after we talk about Freud. Right now all you need to know is that the line between reality and madness is thin, thin and shaky.

Freud was, as you might expect, very into that. He draws heavily on a German pun--evidentally heimlich means both homey or familiar and secret or hidden. In terms of the uncanny, things are most terrifying when we think we’re playing in the realm of our daylight reality and then suddenly the rules change. No one, for example, is horrified when Snow White RISES FROM THE DEAD, because we already are accepting that we’re in a fairy tale with, like, singing animals who do housework. As Freud says, ““as soon as it is given an arbitrary and unrealistic setting in fiction it is apt to lose its quality of the uncanny” (19). And what are these eerie occurances? Because Freud is a master classifier, they can be split across “either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed (17)--so he believes either the terrors of childhood or of primitive man resurface in our horror stories. The parts of us that we repress resurface as ghosts and witches and we confront them in physical manifestations separate from us. For example, the supernatural power of, like, a giant or a firestarter, relates to our own narcissistic impulses to dominate others. Freud goes through and gives a catalogue of things that are uncanny:

• dismembering
• the double
• living dolls
• repetition (like seeing the same number all day)
• evil eye
• ghosts
• witchcraft
• madness

As you listen to this year’s Halloween episode, The Sandman, you can point out where these pop up--see if you can get Uncanny Bingo!

NATHANEL TO LOTHAIRE

Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long - so very long. My mother, am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time in dissipation, entirely forgetful of her fair, angelic image that is so deeply imprinted on my heart. Such, however, is not the case. Daily and hourly I think of you all; and the dear form of my lovely Clara passes before me in my dreams, smiling upon me with her bright eyes as she did when I was among you. But how can I write to you in the distracted mood which has been disturbing my every thought! A horrible thing has crossed my path. Dark forebodings of a cruel, threatening fate tower over me like dark clouds, which no friendly sunbeam can penetrate. I will now tell you what has occurred. I must do so - that I plainly see - the mere thought of it sets me laughing like a madman. Ah, my dear Lothaire, how shall I begin ? How shall I make you in any way realize that what happened to me a few days ago can really have had such a fatal effect on my life? If you were here you could see for yourself; but, as it is, you will certainly take me for a crazy fellow who sees ghosts. To be brief, this horrible occurrence, the painful impression of which I am in vain endeavoring to throw off, is nothing more than this - that some days ago, namely on the 30th of October at twelve o'clock noon, a barometer-dealer came into my room and offered me his wares. I bought nothing, and threatened to throw him downstairs, upon which he took himself off of his own accord.

Only circumstances of the most peculiar kind, you will suspect, and exerting the greatest influence over my life, can have given any import to this occurrence. Moreover, the person of that unlucky dealer must have had an evil effect upon me. So it was, indeed. I must use every endeavor to collect myself, and patiently and quietly tell you so much of my early youth as will bring the picture plainly and clearly before your eyes. As I am about to begin, I fancy that I hear you laughing, and Clara exclaiming, 'Childish stories indeed...

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and every semester, I feel like it’s New Year’s Day. “This semester,” I say, “everything’s going to be different.” I revise my classes, everything from switching two minor assignments to rehauling the entire curriculum. I try to create assignments that will catch my students’ attention, prepare them for their other classes, and, because I teach dozens of students, be interesting to grade.

But how do I know if the assignments I find interesting are effective? Or even that the students will think they are interesting? In Engaging Writers and Dynamic Disciplines, Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki explore how students learn to write in their majors, and how instructors write in their disciplines. These two things are not synonyms. Disciplines are dynamic, even before you account for all of the interdisciplinary work that goes on between them. Thaiss and Zawacki interviewed scholars from across a wide variety of disciplines and found that “many of our informants describe changes in their disciplines that allow scholars to work in alternative ways--ways that might formerly have been closed to them” some of these scholars are hesitant about these new ways of writing, but many embrace them (44).

I remember the first time I wrote an article that was truly alternative. It was an article for Harlot about the biopower of zombies and I referenced everything from Foucault to World War Z to Joshua Gunn. I wrote about my personal experience dressing up like a zombie for a “capture the flag” 5k and about buying a shirt off Etsy. And the whole thing was littered with hyperlinks and quirky footnotes and a half dozen pictures, which cost the journal nothing because the whole thing was exclusively online. This was a far cry from the time I literally sent three copies of an article in a manila folder, through the mail, to England for a more traditional journal. I’m not the only one who has had such exhilarating experiences encountering disciplinary writing in new ways.

Because we remember the heady rush of talking about scholarly topics in slightly less than scholarly ways and the sheer joy of doing something new and “fun,” we might be tempted to assign these new forms of writing to our students, to show them the great diversity of our discipline. If I was able to write the first draft of “The Biopower of Zombies” in one sitting, chuckling to myself in an airport terminal in Ohio, certainly my students would also delight in such open forms of scholarship, right?

According to Thaiss and Zawacki’s research, “the undergraduate students we interviewed and surveyed from across majors showed much less desire to experiment with format and method in their disciplinary classes than to conform to their professors’ expectations” (92). It’s maybe not surprising that scholars who are already pretty familiar with their field would have an easier time adapting to the variations than students who are just learning the ropes for the first time. But not all “alternatives” are equal.

Experimenting with new ideas (eg “Is our obsession with zombies a result of increased non-state organizations?”) is different than having to learn a new format (e.g. casual academic tone with generous hyperlinks). Over all, Thais and Zawacki suggest, that students crave structure and predictability, knowing what the professor is looking for, even more than the wide-open freedom of many disciplines. Think about it: the seasoned professor knows not just what’s appropriate in biology or economics writing, but they also know what kinds of articles can be written by post-docs and what can be written by old-timers, they know what kind of writing different journals prefer. So professors, thinking about “good writing” can actually be combining academic, disciplinary, subdisciplinary and personal writing preferences in ways that baffle students. Sometimes they over generalize and assume that one class taught them “science writing” and sometimes they over patictularize, thinking that one teacher was just “picky.” Students do the best they can with the limited expereince they have.

This is especially evident at the beginning of the semester. One of Thaiss and Zawacki’s student informants pointed out that the first couple of assignments provide a lot of experience in what the class is supposed to be (125), and getting graded feedback provides a sense of not just what that professor is looking for, but what “counts” in the field. While “the mature writer in a field has encountered a sufficient range of course environments to develop an over all sense of disciplinary goals and methods” while novices “have not yet encountered the array of exigencies and therefor genres that typify it” (109). Following Perry’s developmental stages, Thaiss and Zawacki sugge...

Andocides

(An-DOS-id-dees)

Do you remember in the 90s when there was this huge “thug life” thing going on? Shady types getting money doing shady things. Andocides, the 5th century BCE rhetor, would have fit fell into that world. Even though he may have been acquainted with Socrates, he was more interested in roving with his friends of rabble-rousers. He was born to wealth and lived as what one editor called “a hot-headed young man-about-town with more money than sense” (321).

His carefree life came to a hard stop after a significant act of vandalism. Andocides was accused of multition of the Herms right before an Athenian expedition against Sicily--exactly not the time that you want to get the gods mad at you. Everyone was shocked. The act was seditious and blasphemous. Athens could forgive some offences, but not parodying the most intimate religious beliefs on the eve of war. The act was seen as an affront against democracy from exactly the kind of rich snobs who would want to consolidate power. Numbers of the stone images of Hermes were mutated across Athens in one night. Just as quickly, informers sprang up to place the blame. Forty two members of the riotous party were named. Andocides was one of the accused.

But when they threw Andocides into prison, he did what all those 90s gangsters warned about--he turned snitch. He revealed the names of everyone who was involved, and, although he was an accomplice, he was still exiled from Athens and had his citizenship stripped from him. It turned out worse for the four men that he snitched on--they were all put to death.

But if you’re a young man of wealth, a little thing like state-defying vandalism and sending four people to their deaths doesn’t get you down. He traveled the city states of Greece, making friends with powerful people. Powerful and shady, but powerful. Andocides came back to Athens during the oligarchy and it didn’t go well--he narrowly missed being sentenced to death and was imprisoned. Later, he was set free, or maybe he escaped. The historical record is hazy on that detail.

So you can see the kind of life that he lived. And it reflects in his greatest speeches. On His Return was written as an attempt to get back into the city’s good graces. The reasons for his exile was fresh in their minds, and he openly admits his guilt. He claims to be a changed man: “my behavior today,” he says “is much more in keeping with my character than my behavior then” (26). He had been foolish and he had been unlucky--dreadfully unlucky. “No one came near suffering the sorrows which I suffered” (9). However, he points out, he is rich. That wealth can bring in a lot of corn to prevent famine. It also buys a lot of naval support. And he is willing to use his wealth to help Athens. “I have been reckless of both life and goods when called up” in an effort ”to render this city such a service as would sipose you to let me at last resume my rights as your fellow” (10).

Unfortunately, Andocides’ bad luck continued. Before he even began his speech, people were muttering against him. It might not help that he smugly referred to his accusors as “either the most stupid of mankind or the worst of public enemies” (1) and preemptively said that he would forgive the people all the wrongs he suffered (27). He still comes across as a rich snot weasling his way back.

Andocides did finally get back to Athens under a general amnesty after yet another political overthrow. For 3 years, everything was coming up Andocides. He held important roles in political cultural life. His influence was growing and everyone was forgetting his youthful indescretions.

And then enemies old and new began to circle. Callias II, along with some others, created a legal case against him, arguing that the amnesty shouldn’t have applied to Andocides and that he should be kept out of the assembly and, oh yeah, how about put to death for rebellion? While he again had to confront the ghosts of his past,Andocides had some advantages this time.

For one thing, time had passed. People had moved on and forgotten much of the outrage they felt in the several political upheavals they had been suffering since then. Also, Andocides had become a productive member of society, totally supporting the city in many facets. It seems that Andocides had also learned to temper his rhetoric. “On the Mysteries” was a plea for his life, but it’s also a thrilling piece of legal rhetoric. He refutes claims that he was involved in other acts of blasphemy and sedition and recalls his very minor role in the destruction of the herms. He also changes tactic from deigning to absolve Athens of the wrongs they had done him to emphasizing Athen’s positive qualities. “The whole of Greece,” he says “thinks that you have shown the greatest generosity and wisdom in devoting yourselves, not to revenge, but to the preservation of your city and the reuniting of its ci...

What do a mid-century photographer, a fresh new work, politics and poop jokes, solitary confinement and a music video all have in common? Why it must be time for a rhetoric journal roundup! This week we are going to take a little journey through the quarter’s last issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, otherwise known as the RSQ. The RSQ is the official publication of the Rhetorical Society of America, otherwise know as the RSA. So the RSA published the RSQ and now it’s time for the intro for you-know-who!

[intro]

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history and I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve finally finished the spring issue of the RSQ.

Before I give you a summary of this quarter’s issue, let me just give you a little context on the RSQ. The RSQ has been rolling out for decades and is probably one of the most prestigious and longest-running journals for rhetorical studies. If you become a dues-paying member of the RSA--and it’s pretty cheap for students--, you can receive your own subscription to the RSQ, and you’ll find that it has some of the same focus as the RSA conferences held every other year--it’s focused on the rhetoric side of comp/rhet, usually with a big dose of theory. You won’t find a lot of articles in the RSQ about first-year composition, but you will find archival research, cultural artifacts, history and more.

So let’s take a walk through the Spring 2020 issue of RSQ.

First off, we have an article from PhD candidate Emliy N. Smith because, yes, grad students can get published in RSQ. Smith has looked into the photograph of Charles “Teenie” Harris, an African American photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith argues that Harris’ photography counters other mid-century depictions of Black people in two important ways: first, the iconic form of photography--iconic photography, as Smith points out, are high performance. Think, as Smith says, of the photograph of raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It’s dramatic, semi-staged and capital M Meaningful. Harris had some pictures like that, but Smith is more interested in the other type of photography he did, the so called idiomatic image, colloquial and conversational. She describes photographs of Harris’ that show Black people creating their own lives as they are “simply moving about in a world suffused with structural racism” (85) like one picture showing kids at a Halloween party, part of their own community, and that community building its own future through its children. The “idiomatic, everyday work of building and sustaining ...Black community,” Smith argues, is itself a powerful mode of visual rhetoric, not less than the iconic mode.

Romeo Garcia and Jose M. Cortez wrote the next article “The Trace of a Mark That Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” If you wondered what a third of those words mean, you are not alone. I had to read the abstract three times before I understood what the article was about, but then I began to see that those words I didn’t understand were exactly what the article was about. In rhetoric we talk a lot about postcolonialism, but these authors are seeking new theories andnew terms--one term is decoloniality. Instead of positioning, for example, the Latin American experience in terms of its difference from Europe, how about just “actually theorizing rhetoric from the locus of non-Western ... space” (94)? The authors give an example of the kind of contrastive rhetoric that really gets their goat. Don P Abbott wrote an article about rhetoric in Aztec culture where he says, “It is possible that Aztec discourse, both practical and conceptually, would have continued to evolve as the culture itself developed” (qtd 99) and Garcia and Crotez are like...”wait what...? So you think Aztec culture was ‘undeveloped’? Do you think that logocentrism is the only way to figure rhetoric? Uh, no..!” This brings us to the other term in the title that might not be familiar--anthropoi. As you might guess, this word has a connection to anthropology, with the idea that the anthropoi are people you study, “that which cannot escape the status of being external to the subject and being gramed as object/nature” (97). But wait! de-Colonialism has its own flaws. How can modern rhetoricians ever hope to reconstruct the rhetorics of people in radically different cultures living thousands of years ago? “Decoloniality,” the authors say, “cannot carry out its promis of decolonization while adopting the language and conceptual apparatus of propriety” (103) If post-colonial thinks about the other and decoloniality gets caught in a loop of using western logocentrism to approach non-Western rhetorics, what’s the solution? Well....they propose an alterity symbolized in the letter X, both as the end of Latinx, and also as in the symbol you use to signify your name if you aren’t...