Who gets to Decide what Rhetoric is?

I am semi-puzzled between the discussion that we had in class on Thursday, and Jackie's article "Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric." As I understand now, Jackie and Gesa are looking to include women in the rhetorical tradition by recovering lost texts. They seek to discover these women's rhetorical theories in order to enhance the field of rhetoric. They want to not only include western women, but they want to globalize this project to include women's texts around the world.

I asked this question in class on Thursday: "Are they finding a goldmine of rhetoricians globally?"

Kate answered: "It depends on your definition of rhetoric."

Does it? Does it really? I feel like that was a very short answer to a really important question.

Throughout the semester, we have been studying these texts that mostly argued about the same things: eloquence, the cannons, ethos, logos, pathos. I was led to believe that this is what rhetoric is, because that is what we studied the vast majority of the semester in a Rhetorical Theory class.

Then we studied a few people who did not write about rhetorical issues. They wrote about slavery, women's rights, etc. So I tried to examine how these people were using eloquence, cannons, ethos, logos, and pathos, because I thought that was the purpose of reading it for this class. But when does this stuff stop being rhetoric? Is t when the author is no longer trying to persuade someone? Is it when the subject matter is not about cannons or eloquence? It seems to me like Jackie and Gesa want rhetoric to be an extremely inclusive field, possibly to the point where absolutely any words ever written or spoken are rhetoric. Maybe even body language?

I'm struggling with this concept.

Jackie and Gesa

I would like to comment on: “we take note that women are indeed being more systematically included as a normal part of the rhetorical-studies landscape.” (131) I guess I have a question before I make the point I was originally going to: the writer here says “being more” and it makes me wonder is Jackie and Gesa are implying that studies in woman’s rhetoric are now being given the proper attention. Whereas in the past women were seldom associated with rhetorical practices. And I tend to think that is correct based on what we have discussed in class.

But back to the original quote, which goes on to define where women are receiving recognition: textually and contextually.  The term textually refers to the range of texts being produced that are considered worth recognition. I feel that the types of texts women were allowed or able to produces were very limited. Thus making it easier to systematically include them in rhetorical studies. From the texts we have read in class I have found than women generally did not write, and if they did it much of their text revolved around religion. Contextually refers to the context of the women who wrote the piece; the social circle they operate in, or how they practice discourse. Take for example Aspasia, whom was not of true Greek decent, rumored to be a prostitute, and none of her works has survived to provide proof of her rhetorical abilities. Many people have been skeptical of Aspasia’s work and thus not placed a high level of significance on her work. However more significance should be awarded. It is noted several times that Aspasia helped teach Socrates what is now know as the Socratic method. I believe that more or equal significance should be placed on Aspasia’s work, since we heavily rely on Socrates for understanding rhetorical practices.

Later on Jackie and Gesa are discussing the evidence-rich approach and something interesting is said: “Thus, we make rhetoric, rather than just women’s rhetorics, visible as a multisensible, multidimensional action affected by sociopersonal decision making within sociopolitical context.” (135) I agree that Jackie and Gesa strongly care about women’s rhetoric, however I believe that Jackie and Gesa love and care about all rhetoric. Also after reading this sentence I felt that male rhetoric, but lets just call that rhetoric, enhances feminist rhetorical practices. By having rhetoric it allows for a standard to be based off of. Women’s rhetoric is now, more than ever, being held up and compared to traditional rhetoric. I could be wrong but I feel as if less significance is being placed on the gender of the writer than the actual written document.

Rhetoric: for the masses?

Something written in today's readings caught my attention more than the rest. In "A call to action", Royster speaks to her experience as an editor at SAGE journal. She highlights the importance and personal gratification arising from striving to publish a journal which was "accessible to women from all walks of life."

This brought to my mind an important issue--well, perhaps not an issue, but certainly something worth pondering: how does rhetoric relate to the masses, to those not from the academic world? It does apply, this we know. But the texts and rhetoricians we have studied so far have certainly not concerned themselves with the masses. It was good to see Royster make a point about this in an otherwise very academically oriented piece of work.

This was especially interesting to me because it is an issue I hope to explore in my own project, both for myself and for anyone bored enough to peruse it. We do indeed see rhetoric all around us in our everyday lives--indeed, it is hard to go far without encountering some form of persuasive communication. But how does this "everyday rhetoric" compare with the formal theories and astute rhetoricians we've encountered in our academic lives, in this class?

I really want to explore this relationship, so as to find the importance of rhetorical studies. it's really been a struggle for me so far. This probably sounds weird, but I'd really like to speak with Royster on the subject. From her work, and from what others have written on the blog, it seems like something she too holds to be important.

Feminism=Multidimensional Examinations

I'm really getting stuck on the term feminism. Mainly, the connotations and implications that are involved with the term. I understand that for feminists, especially women,  there is a special pride in the word, something that shows their emerging rhetoric and philosophy. But, feminism for me is not limited to females or even a more feminine way of looking at the world. The past descriptions of feminist thinking such as a strong emphasis on harmonization, activist movements, and intuitive thinking are all contained in this rhetoric, but they are just a part. This is not to take anything away from women, because they did spearhead this emerging rhetoric, but I think that the special function of feminism is the connectivity that it fosters, and when the term feminism is invoked, it doesn't create a connectivity for the male reader, but a distancing, something that seems to imply that it is outside the realm of masculine thought.

I almost feel like there is a tad bit of resentment for the past two thousand years of western rhetoric. I say that with more than a little sarcasm but if this new emerging rhetoric is called feminism, then what came before could be called masculine. And yes, male rhetors did distance the female, basically saying that feminine ideals were lesser, but, if feminism is called feminism, which I do think is the new rhetoric for the 21st century and beyond, then it is hindering its own connectivity by its exclusionary word and in a sense reversing the chain of command. If feminism does become mainstream rhetoric what will happen will be nothing short of the disdain for previous "masculine, exclusionary rhetoric" and the past two thousand years of rhetoric will go up in smoke and be devalued.

These new ways of examining text and our world that Royster and Kirsch propose are different from what has been previously valued. The two points we looked at today, critical imagination and strategic contemplation, are seemingly far from previous Western rhetoric, but actually they are tied closely to previous rhetoricians ideas. Critical imagination could be seen as a tool for kairotic inspection, and strategic contemplation as a tool for invention. But, these two concepts create different relationships than ones we have previously seen and frame the argument in a different way, making them valuable. And that is exactly what feminism for me is all about. It is still rhetoric and deals with persuasion in ways that are tied to previous rhetoric but the frame of reference that we use to look at it is shifting, maybe using feminine qualities, but more importantly reshaping previous rhetoric and showing how the past two thousand years of rhetoric can still be applicable as our subjectivity and exclusionary models of society begin to break away and a new interdependent and collaborative oriented rhetoric begins to emerge.

Critical Imagination

"We use critical imagination as a tool to engage, as it were, in hypothesizing, in what might be called 'educated guessing' as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand" (Royster 71).

While this quote is right at the beginning of the readings for today it is one that strongly resonated with me as I continued to read the rest of the chapter. Critical imagination, by Royster and Kirsch’s definitions, is what both limits and assists feminist rhetorical practices. As stated in the text; “My desire was to help the students to create a narrative and descriptive database from which they might think more viscerally about Ellis and his associates…. I fashioned writing activities designed to help them push their imaginations, to contemplate various details of the experience, to speculate about possibilities” (Royster 82). The use of critical imagination creates this idea of truth by utilizing narrative to create individuals that a class can relate to in an effort to formulate papers and discussions based on what can be perceived at the time.

Considering my paper is dealing with the entire idea of truth, critical imagination feels like a concept that deals exactly with what I wish to talk about. While it can have elements of truth to it, it is not trying to define truth. Instead, it can utilize various methods of discussion—such as narrative—to depict someone’s idea of what could be truth. Through doing this it creates a semblance of reality and makes us perceive truth. Yet it is not—as they define in the text—truth. It is simply a lens with which we can view everything. I will be keeping this idea as I go about writing my paper and expanding on it a bit further.

Modifying Traditions

While reading these two chapters, I repeatedly felt as though the authors were writing with the intention of pushing back against the restrictions caused by traditions, while not rejecting traditions themselves per se.  For instance, their choice to employ almost-informal key phrases (such as ‘tacking in’ and tacking out’) as well as first names in reference to themselves surely reflects the wish incorporate personality and experience into academic writing...which is somewhat unconventional.  

Critical imagination and strategic contemplation perhaps work to similar purposes.  Within the fifth chapter, it is written that critical imagination (or CI) “mandates that researchers engage their topics in multiple ways, using dialectic and dialogic approaches and imagining ways in which historical subjects might have left traces of a stream in places where we may not have looked, looked closely enough, or may have overlooked” (79).  Modifying traditions is necessary for the acquisition of new or lost information.

Concerning stategic contemplation, the authors come out and admit that it's a bit of a departure from academic norms; for instance, they explain that “whole notion of making the time and space to sit and think or to talk about doing so as a normal part of scholarly methodologies has seemed unintelligible” (86).  Now that they've pointed it out, this fact does seem odd.  After all, it’s usually viewed as helpful for authors of prose and poetry to slow down and reflect upon their work before completing it.  Why isn’t this attitude likewise applied to academics? 

In class, we’ve been discussing the role of narration in rhetoric, and how older rhetorical texts are generally prone to feature less while more recent pieces often contain more.  Since strategic contemplation also calls for relating one’s life experiences to those of another person, I’d venture that the authors of Feminist Rhetorical Practices certainly approve of narration as a means of cutting past artificial restrictions as well.    

Novel Applications

            The chapters in Feminist Rhetorical Practices did a nice job summarizing what we have been working toward all semester in this course.  While their ideas of “tacking in” and “tacking out” provided readers with the necessary groundwork for understanding the rest of their theories.  I thought their more important analyses came in chapter six, which is essentially an extension of five. The following quote got me thinking about the current rhetorical landscape and Royster and Kirsch’s argument there has been a huge shift in subjects addressed.  The text reads, “ [the] process of paying attention, of being mindful, of attending to the subtle, intuitive, not-so-obvious parts of research has the capacity to yield rich rewards.  It allows scholars to observe and notice, to listen and hear voices often neglected or silenced, and to notice more overtly their own responses to what they are seeing, reading, reflecting on, and encountering during their research processes” (85).  Would we as scholars have the same questions, making the same observations within rhetorical, compositional and literary studies if not for this infusion of diverse thought processes?  It is an interesting assertion, though I’m not entirely sure these research practices are entirely new, but rather specifically relevant.  I feel like I make most of the moves Royster and Kirsch suggest in my weekly blog posts in this and other classes, by applying modern situations to the more fundamental theories of rhetoric.  I feel like such comparison brings out a lot of the subtleties brought up in these authors’ depiction of critical imagination as well as strategic contemplation.  I understand the importance of reviving old ideals to understand they were being elucidated through a certain lens and perhaps uncover other attitudes and ideas of the time.  To understand that these were not the only claims, but the only claims being made is an important insight these authors have provided us.  Again, I don’t necessarily consider this any sort of revelation, more a building on a rhetorical archetype, but this particular interpretation helps to specifically identify what we have been doing from the get go with our rhetoricians.  Perhaps having this knowledge will allow us to go even more in depth, into the minds and lifestyles of those responsible for the creation of our evolving modern ideals.

Picking What We Research

Listening in class the other day to the different projects, all I could think about was how vastly varied our interests are. Royster and Kirsch state, "the key questions are how do these features of the researcher's sense of self inform the topic the researcher studies, the research questions she asks (and does not ask), the data she collects (and does not collect), the interpretations she offers (and does not consider), and so on. In other words, we are suggesting that identity plays a much-larger role in research than we have considered at this point" (95). This makes a lot of sense looking at the works we have read so far, Fredrick Douglass was interlinked in what he was writing about, as was Christen de Pizan. The work of those rhetoricians is completely linked to their identity, so what we take them from is completely linked to ours.

My interest in authority comes from my experiences growing up as short, and as a girl, as well as Catholic. All three of things have equally shaped my own characteristics as well as what I like to research. My ethos is regularly diminished because of these three categories, and the compensation, the tokenism, that takes place to reverse preconceived notions is always present. In looking back over my life the rhetorical canon of memory becomes increasingly important to the Royster and Kirsch's idea of "critical imagination." Although I can never hold onto exact conversations, I use imagination to recreate those memories, and than I critically put them to use in self-reflecting on my identity and how it shapes my interests as a researcher. In Jackie's Reflection she states, "I had a research agenda" (81). The word "agenda" stood out to me because it implies a problem that needs addressing. Perhaps the real connection between identity and research questions is what problems we personally feel like need to be addressed, whether we have lived through them or they have made us uncomfortable.

Tracking with Tacking

Looking at these readings I am still having a bit of an issue with "tacking in and tacking out".  My mind wants to read these as Tracking, which leads me to a whole new set of phrases and how I interpret the readings.

That being said, what I want to focus on is the part of critical imagination.  This is where I imagine, I guess the pun is intended, the meat of any story comes out.  As Gesa points out, it goes beyond the traditional journals and writings.

What I see is that critical imagination allows for, not just rhetoricians, but all writers to take a leap forward with their writing.  It's not a pure regurgitation of fact, or a recitation of what has been written, but a comprehension and expression of that what writers choose to express.

To be able to make that critical leap is what is going to separate writing and great writing.  Again, this is purely my opinion, at this point, but what I think that critical imagination will allow writers to do is make those connections, and allow them to explore the various points in which we (they) play with the words and form them into the groups that we (they) do.

Jacqueline makes a very nice statement by saying that it allows students to think more viscerally about what they are writing. 

A new (to me) way to study

It took me awhile to wrap my head around the idea of strategic contemplation. It's a completely new (or at least a new take) as research method for me. Whenever I think research, I usually think it on the science side—hard data based on experiments based on previous data from previous experiments, and so on. That said, within any research there has to be a synthesis of the findings, extrapolations of what its impact could be or how it will contribute to the field of study. Strategic contemplation seems to take this synthesis just one step further.

My next argument was going to be that both critical imagination and strategic contemplation are completely based on inference, and therefore mean less than the 'facts'. But any study is inference—we think we have it figured out, and then we are proved wrong. This is true in any (academic or not) field. I think this is where the strength of strategic contemplation and critical imagination lies—the strategies accept that there are no set-in-stone facts, and that study is an ever evolving and changing activity. And by accepting that condition, they open the field to literally anything, which has to help whatever it is you are studying. You let go of any conditions, preconceptions, or hopes you have of specific finding or outcome, and see what comes up. That approach seems like it could turn up some pretty interesting results.

Oh no... Kelly's posting way past his bedtime again...

Dialectic = logical argumentation
Dialogic = of dialogue

I see those two words individually and am fine, but seeing them together, my mind wants to do something horrible to me... I see "dialect" and "logic" and then they become transposed and I become inverted, and all sense of meaning warps into some odd universe where the answer to everything is 42.

OK, that's an exaggeration.

My point is that language is silly. It's a silly little thing we can play with, like a toy. We can hide poetry practically anywhere, causing someone else to stumble and trip over a mental tongue trying to taste the meaty details of an argument; is it savory? Sweet? Or mildly bitter? We can dialecticise dialogical clusters of words and say something important like, "The examples of scholarship we have showcased above serve to illustrate the point that life is material, not abstract, such that we have come to see the importance of fleshing out our use of the phrase lived/embodied experience as an extremely powerful concept" (95). But we know that flesh is no concept. It is a thing that can be felt, but that flesh dead decades or centuries ago cannot, so the fact that it once was covering meat and bone that mobilized an "embodied experience" is a concept we have to use our imagination to re-experience, re-feel, re-touch, flesh out and illustrate in a way that honors her/him/them and the life they lived and discussed within their rhetorical situation.

That's my take on Strategic Contemplation.

And Critical Imagination... I learned humility on page 77. "[S]cholars grappled earnestly with the complex challenges of engaging with historical figures whom they do not necessarily admire or admire fully." I read that and then Ramus laughed in my face and said, "Ha! Who's the jerk now?" I felt bad, but then stopped doing that. It's difficult not to allow personal feelings (when I'm being judgmental) to get in the way of learning what someone like Ramus has to teach. And I know better. In fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mrs. Bujak. She was a mean old nasty French woman who threw erasers with a goal to cause physical pain. I never saw her stand in the rain, 'cause I was sure she'd melt. She made me be the student editor of the school newspaper. She didn't even ask me if I wanted to be it, she just said I was it and so I was. I had to stay after school. I had to write stuff, more than the other kids. She was mean. I'll never forget her. To this day, I don't know why, but she believed in me. I learned back then that personal feelings can too easily get in the way seeing the truth in things. It wasn't until I realized how much I enjoyed being the student editor (I don't even remember doing anything, just that I loved doing it) that I realized she wasn't being mean at all.

Anyway, the point of that last bit of rambling was to say that I tend to let my judgments of the author dictate what I take from their work. If I don't like them, I disagree. Slap my hand! That's no way to learn. It's just not dia-logical. :)

Whoa.

I think I just made a break through on how I read. I don't know how I can tie this into rhetoric exactly, but it happened while reading the assigned readings for Tuesday.

So, we're finally out of the old, harder to read rhetoricians, and I was expecting to pick up Jackie and Gesa and be able to follow their train of thought in a much easier fashion. Modern rhetoric = easier to read, right? Wrong. It's not for lack of concentration, or interest (because feminist rhetoric is an interesting subject to me), but I found myself having to read passages and single sentences over and over again. I literally couldn't focus my mind. Until I hit this passage:

"Desser identifies the tensions between the missonary women expressed in their desire to connect with the students they taught and the larger community into which they moved (made evident by their efforts to learn the Hawaiian language, for example)  at the same time they continued to believe in the superiority of the English language and of Christian values, beliefs, and moral codes" (77).

And instantly, an image of a uppity women in white gowns and severe buns teaching in a schoolroom in Hawaii jumped into my head. I didn't have to read the passage over again; I knew exactly what had just happened. And it hit me - my largest problem with academic writing is that I'm a visual learner - and I cannot come up with a picture in my head for what is happening while I read an academic text. Suddenly, the reason that I found texts like Phaedrus and works by Frederick Douglass so easy to read is because I always had a clear picture in my head of what was happening while I read, painted by their text - something that I have not been able to do with almost any of the other texts this entire semester.

*head implodes*

I need to find a different way to approach these readings instead of beating my head against a wall. That is going to have to be my main focus with the rest of the readings this semester, I believe.

To Agree or Disagree

I found these two chapters very interesting. I felt at the same time very intrigued by the methodology that they are supporting, but I also felt a kind of resistant to it. I don't know whether it is from years of being told to write objectively, to have the facts speak for themselves and to not interject my own opinions, etc, that have caused me to resist this methodology – but I really can't buy everything that they are saying.

First – let's look at critical imagination. Using this tool, we can make hypotheses regarding women's (or underprivileged/minority rhetors) rhetoric in order to broaden our ideas of what rhetoric is and therefore open people's eyes and try and make change happen. One line I'm interested in reads: “The point to emphasize here is that by tacking in and out, through the use of critical imagination as a dialectical and dialogical analytical tool, we enhance our capacity to account more substantially and respectfully for the performances of women” (75). To me, this seems very strange. How can we account more substantially for the performances of women if all of these ideas are based on inferences and not facts? Is it that these ideas lead us to facts, which reveal a more accurate history of women's rhetoric? And if so, doesn't that just acknowledge the fact that despite all the studying that we do, it is nearly impossible to come to a definite conclusion about what women's rhetoric is, because there will always be more data to go over, always be differences between each set of data? And also the fact that we can only come to a constructed reality based on discourse (think Foucault) rather than the actual reality of the situation in the past, which we cannot access? Then I get to the moment that I don't want to get to, but it's inevitable: if we can't make a definite conclusion, then what's the point?

To me, I think this kind of research only matters if we are seeing successful moments of rhetoric – because that is something we can legitimately use in our own writing. The value of finding these differentiating ideas and these minority ideas on rhetoric is that they can reveal more useful ways of doing rhetoric – rhetoric being an active part of the “past, present, and future” (73). But everything is so situational and so subjective that it nearly seems impossible that the techniques that were successful then will still be successful now.

Next, strategic contemplation – the act of looking outside the box, basically, at things that seem challenging to our own ideas, or repulsive, or impossible. With this, we attempt to get outside of our “filter bubble” in order to see important things that we would normally overlook. In this section, I found this line particularly interesting: “I concluded that although the students understood the words [...] they didn't have a visceral enough sense of what the words [pathos, logos, ethos] really meant as useful concepts in crafting a powerful and persuasive text” (97). While I like this idea of finding the physical and concrete notions of what a given person's ethos might be (their home, their hometown, society, etc), I couldn't help thinking about how in most cases, the author is dead when it comes to a text. While most of the time understanding the author (which in essence, is understanding their ethos and pathos) is very helpful to understanding a text, that knowledge's significance becomes muddled when we try to look at a text only for its value as that text – and think of it in terms of reader response (then again, the rhetoric of public speaking is meshed a lot closer with the identity of the author than of other modes of writing). But it seems that feminist rhetoric puts so much value on the author and on the identity of the reader that it seems really incongruent as to what we should value more – authorial intent or reader's response. If we learn so much about the author, and learn to view these texts through the author's situation, then our own reading of the text becomes almost unnecessary, because we are still only reading it through an understanding of the author. I value identity, because I value perception and subjective truth, but I think the authors' (Royster and Kirsch) lose me at the point where they make research so subjective that it seems like it can only be useful to the person doing the research. 

Outward or Inward

Jackie and Gesa propose in chapter sixteen that Strategic Contemplation allows for two different parts of the research process.  The first is an outward journey, “in real time and space, more in keeping with traditional notions of fieldwork, (85)” where researchers would visit archives, historical sites, cities or regions of their subject. The second form of research is an inward journey that focuses on, “researchers noticing how they process, imagine, and work with materials (85)”.  However I believe that strategic contemplations lies more on the side of the inward journey. 

Yes researchers have to acquire knowledge to begin contemplating an idea, yet a researcher does not always have to go out into the field to find knowledge about their topic; sometimes it may be in the library because someone else has already complied it. Just by the title alone I believe that strategic contemplations focuses on the individuals own thought process making it more applicable to the second style of journey. In almost every scientific paper there is a large section about the methods and another about procedure; where the authors of the study describe in great detail, how the processed the information and how they worked with materials. This section is very important because it is written with the intention that others can preform the same experiment and get the same results.  Another large section is the discussion/ reflections where the scientists are able to note anything they felt like could have impact the experiment as well as their conclusions about the study. Again these sections are a reflection of the experiment and thus make me think that the inward journey is more important than the external.