last post

Overall the last chapter of Royster seems to beopen ended. It also answers the question the class asked all semester; what is the definition of rhetoric? Royster basically says that rhetoric has been forever changing, and it will continue to do so. It will continue to do so as long as we are continuing to work at it. This would be the main reason for the first class goal, understanding rhetoricians from past to present. When you relate this back to Royster, we have to understand all the classic and modern rhetoricians so we can improve, and morph rhetoric. Royster also answers the question, if the classical rhetoricians don’t relate to my rhetoric then why should I study them? The answer is so that you can find the reasons you disagree then change it to relate to modern day, with the end goal of putting down a blueprint for the future.

             “We claim also that when we take a more critical view of this work in the larger context of the field itself… it is past time to reach for more ambiguous goals, as indeed, colleagues across rhetoric studies are now doing.” (Royster 149) Royster relates to the second-class goal, exploring the active, ethical, and productive prospects of rhetoric. Rhetoric is active according to Royster because it is ever changing. Rhetoric has to change according to Royster because it is not ambiguous enough. In my opinion this goes hand in hand with active rhetoric. There is no way to define it because it is changing so much that you cant catch up to define it. This is a positive thing because society is ever changing as well. This raises the question for me what about ethical rhetoric?

            Society seems to be stepping further and further away from ethics. Ethics, like rhetoric, are ever changing. Ethics also vary from culture to culture. What about con-men, kidnappers, and thieves? They use rhetoric to get what they want. A con-man could convince someone to give them money to invest, then just invest it in their own wallet. Is this ethical? I would think not but it cold be ethical to the con-man. It could be his only means to get money and food. So how can anyone say rhetoric is ethical? I think that you have to look at the 1st goal of the class to answer this question. You have to learn about rhetoric from past to present, right and wrong, good and bad. Once you learn you can hopefully be aware of the ethical aspects of rhetoric.  

chapter 5/6 post

I have been thinking about the class as a whole and the things I have learned. There has been a lot from Cicero to Aristotle to feminist rhetoric. The information is there but I am struggling with the ideas of how to use it? And why? The answer was presented to me in chapter 5 of Feminist Rhetorical Practices. Critical imagination is the title of the chapter. To properly study rhetoric you must use critical imagination according to Kirsch. Kirsch goes onto say on page 72, “We go back and forth between past and present, their worlds and ours, their priorities and our own… It connects both us as scholars and the women as rhetorical subjects to the future.”  Kirsch is specifically talking about feminist rhetoric in the future but I think this quote relates best to our class.

When we study the past we constantly try to connect what we learned from the past to the present. This is a great thing according to the quote by Kirsch and it is exactly what Kirsch wants from us as rhetoricians as the future. Some of the theories and techniques used by the classical rhetoricians do not coincide with the present. For example Plato not believing in rhetoric in writing, now rhetoric in writing is prevalent. Another example could be the memory aspect of oratory. But now with projectors you can look at the audience and read of the screen at the same time, like the president. Memory is not as important as it used to be. As future rhetoricians we must look to the past and be able to morph it into rhetoric relevant to our audience or us.

I want to study rhetoric specifically in writing. That is why I signed up for the class. At first I struggled because of the focus mainly on oratory. According to Kirsch I must understand rhetoricians in the past, so I can critique their techniques and lessons now, so in the future I can properly influence rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric, in my opinion is the best example of this. Women were not being taken seriously at the beginnings of feminism. The techniques a man used in rhetoric was not necessarily a technique that would work for women. Women had to come up with their own techniques such as, “ to actually use tension, conflicts, balances, and counterbalances.” (Kirsch 72) Feminist had to take what they learned from classical rhetoricians, form their own version, and then they had to change the world. Just like we are challenged by Kirsch to change the world with our rhetoric.

Is Rhetoric Black and White?

Now that we are at the end of the semester it only seems appropriate to think about the beginning, that first day sitting in class when all of us were full of questions and wonder. We so badly wanted to master what it was that we were about to learn and had so hoped that it would come easily.

Week after week, we read all different kinds of rhetorical compositions. Some focused more upon eloquence, some concentrated on oratory and the list goes on and on. With each reading throughout this semester I found myself becoming so confused. Each reading left an impression on me of rhetoric and what it should mean, and those meanings tangled, and twisted, and wrapped around each other. But not a single reading left me with an impression of rhetoric that mirrored another.

But of course, not until our very last reading of the semester does it all come together. In Royster’s piece everything made sense to me at last because of the way that she explains the way most of us view rhetoric and how that can be changed to provide a different outcome.

The entire time that I was trying to find one single definition of rhetoric that could be applied in all situations so that I could have an easier time making sense of things. What I should have been referring to Royster’s ideas about landscape.

When I think about rhetoric as a landscape it all makes so much sense to me. Rhetoric has many different textures. Some poetic and flowing like a river, and some are more academic which have a clear high and a clear low, just like a mountain. But the important thing to remember is that the landscape is always changing over time. Over time, rhetoric is studied and analyzed immensely, this is kind of like the whether that erodes away at the original landscape and makes it something slightly different. Another way that the landscape is changing is with the addition of new landscapes or new studies of rhetoric.
Another really interesting point that she brings up which has allowed me to come full circle in the class is that we can learn the most about rhetoric not by defining it, but by questioning it. So often in the course I was just trying to pin down a solid idea of rhetoric, but in reality when we look at rhetoric through all types of lenses, and ask questions, we learn more than we had ever anticipated.

Royster's work has been the most influential to me in this course by teaching me that learning about a certain subject does not have to be black or white. There is a lot of gray to rhetoric which use to scare me but now I know it is something to be embraced.

Kirsch, Royster, and Paradigms

Here's an intimidating quote: "We emphasize that indeed feminist rhetorical studies is moving beyond the fashioning of presence in the master narratives of rhetorical history toward the renegotiation of the paradigms by which we account for rhetoric as a dynamic phenomenon" (Kirsch and Royster 132).

Obviously, Royster and Kirsch have been intensively discussing paradigms.  If I'm not mistaken, 'paradigm' refers to a philosophy or mindset which not only forms a baseline for outlining research methods, but also more general frameworks followed when seeking information, weighing and interpreting new discoveries, and declaring these discoveries worthwhile or significant.  Kirsch and Royster wish to expose invisible paradigms which allow for "Western, white, elite maleness within public domains" (Kirsch and Royster 134); therefore they propose an enhanced inquiry model.

What probably interests me most about Royster and Kirsch’s book how the authors seek to 'lift a veil' (to bring up the metaphor quoted at the start of chapter nine) which cloaks preexisting, prejudiced paradigms of thought.  Royster points out the unseen strength of ingrained viewpoints by addressing "disciplinary habits" which she says "often feel natural rather than constructed" (Royster 165)

The comparison she also draws to the process of landscaping (subjectively 'shining a spotlight' on certain aspects of a natural scene while pushing the others aside) made me think that all lenses of perception are inevitably going to suffer from limitations.  But I suppose that major problems can arise when one, restrictive, unflinching paradigm is imposed over everything and everyone.  While the different viewpoints of varied people in unique situations (if all of these individuals are given a voice) may clash and result in conflict, they also result in conversations.   

A Changing Tradition

The word tradition typically comes with the definition of passing on the same values and acts to one generation to another, yet Royster and Kirsch challenge this by demanding that other minorities and groups are represented in the rhetorical tradition. It seems problematic to have a tradition that is constantly changing and adaptable because it seems unstable, yet in academia as well as in a historical society tradition is constantly moving. Royster writes in "Discplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric" that, "whatever we currently know about rhetorical history as a disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed and undeveloped possibilities" (148). The metaphor of rhetoric being a landscape is continued on throughout both her article and her co-authored book. Although it encompasses the lack of understanding of the great mass of rhetoric, it appears to be create a strange dissonance. Thus, there needs to be a new call in language. Tradition seems to no longer fully embody everything that rhetoric can or cannot be. In literature studies they use the word "canon" to represent the Western male-dominated of texts, rhetoric needs a new word that more appropriately encompasses the mass of studies in discourse and rhetoric.

Royster goes on to state, "Because we have richly endowed traditions and highly entrenched habits in rhetorical studies that inevitably engender a certain amount of intolerance for change, another challenge is whether we can actually build a higher tolerance for dramatic change, kaleidoscopic vision, and philharmonic interactions" (166). I think the time has come as a discipline to rise to this challenge. Although feminist rhetorics has risen over the last decade, as well as the representation of other minorities the language used to describe it is still oppressive. By being outside of the tradition although still rhetoric still creates a hierarchy as well as binaries that weaken the rhetoric found in these new spaces.

Coming into this class, we had a shallow definition of what rhetoric was. This is the space to recreate that definition in order to encompass the complexity of meanings and find language that will be all-encompassing rather than situated in a tradition or outside of it.

Feminist Retorical Practices as they relate to Patrick

I think that it was Merlin who first posited the question at the beginning of the semester about "How does this [feminist rhetoric] relate to me?"  At the time I wasn't sure how to answer that question.  The easy answer would be to say that "it all matters." 

I have to think of my reality, though.  That reality is that I am a semi-privileged white male who grew up reading the likes of Stephen King and Tom Clancy.  I had nothing against female authors but it wasn't my style...  How does this relate to me?

What Royster and Kirsch have done is to gently reintroduce feminist rhetoric back into mainstream.  I like that they gently do this because again, in my position I think that I sometimes feel that when any group who isn't mainstream tries to introduce themselves into the mainstream they sometimes do so in such a forceful way that it almost turns me off to whatever it is "they are selling."

More than that through the course we have managed to sum up what Royster and Kirsch did in the conclusion by realizing that without feminist rhetoric we aren't seeing the full and complete picture.  There are so many new and varied types of rhetoric that are unfolding as both technology advances and history catches up.  As Royster and Kirsch put it, by reintroducing women to the mainstream we are realizing the many ways in which rhetoric can exist and flourish.

How does this relate to me?  I just finished up interviewing people who are homeless for my capstone project and I might ask myself the same question.  I think the answer is that without all the myriad ways in which a story can be told, we'll never have the full and complete picture of what it means to understand rhetoric and in doing so, we lose valuable writing along the way...

Royster's Landscape

"The challenge is to be adventurous enough in our thinking to take a different path, to find a different viewpoint, and to critique the terms of engagement so that a different sense of the landscape can be made visible, can be deemed valuable, and can become instructive in the re-en-visioning of what constitutes knowledge" (Royster 14).

Suddenly that quote that's been sitting on our website since the beginning of this class makes so much more sense. Wading through the style of the language that Royster uses is still a bit hard in some spots, but I think I've grasped her concept of using landscape as a metaphor about repositioning the way we look at rhetoric - at least, in the way I've interpreted it which is to mean, basically, going back over the landscape to take a closer look at things and find ones that we've missed.

A large section of this actually reminds me of how Patrick (I think?) was thinking of framing his critical discussion - by re-examining time periods that focus on male rhetoric and doing more research on the women rhetors of those eras (I think - Patrick, correct me if I'm wrong but that was the gist I got from your explanation). I particularly thought about that while reading the part detailing Enheduanna and her works. I feel like priestesses are a good place to start when re-examining the landscape of the impact of women in rhetoric because of their elevated status in ancient societies. This is almost a side note, but I'd love to look at the rhetoric of women who were wives to famous authors (only because that's where my focus lies) in the late 1800's, early 1900's because they usually are pushed out of the limelight, achievement wise.