Douglass makes a very legitimate point in speaking about The Liberator. His narrative of how the weekly paper was constructed, and even the fact that the paperboy was willing to sign Douglass up for it, without even being able to pay for the paper, speaks to how powerful the content was.
I think that this particular text speaks so directly to what we've been talking about because it shows directly how rhetoric is used, and in this case how it literally transformed one person from an escaped slave into a man of action and activist.
The correlation that I see between The Liberator, and its intended purpose, to that of today's periodicals, say USA Today, is almost non existent because when we review the two periodicals there is such a dichotomy between the two.
When William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator in 1831 the state of Georgia put a $5,000 bounty on his head for capture. That is $125,000 in today's money. Over the course of 35 years, 1,820 issues and countless miles, Garrison never failed to publish an issue, according to the website http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/the-liberator/ which breaks down a brief history of the paper. His entire campaign for the paper was devoted to "women's rights, pacifism and temperance."
This is key to our very core definitions of rhetoric because we see a very distinct purpose and use of the newspaper. Here is a screen shot of today's USA Today website. Justin Beiber, Black Friday and Health Care are the top subjects.
This tells me that Douglass might have some serious issues with how our rhetoric and writing skills are being used, today. There is not so much power and sway being used, but rather a regurgitation of pop media. Certainly nothing that would get me excited and motive me to do something monumental, not such as Douglass did...
You definitely show an amazing correlation between The Liberator and present periodicals. I think you bring up an extremely valid point in the transformative properties that The Liberator provided to Douglass. In fact, the effects of The Liberator seem to be reflected in his own writing: we are told a story, not given some lecture or educational presentation. He walks us through his personal narrative, but the voice is so empowered with his own passions that it becomes contagious. I think this is why we see the relation between USA Today and The Liberator: both of these medias empower those with news and information geared towards the mindset of the audience with which they are trying to speak to. That sentence seems a little redundant, yet it can easily be simplified: storytellers use facts to portray a story—much like Douglass has done in this piece—that speaks towards our own pathos.
ReplyDeleteYet both of these publications—and even Douglass’s narrative that was read for today—work towards education the masses. As Douglass states; “They said I did not talk like a slave…and that they believed I had never been south of Mason and Dixon’s line” (1078). The education he receives from The Liberator allows for him to completely reinvent himself and change his entire class standing. Therefore, these periodicals serve the purpose of teaching us to be storytellers and develop our own rhetoric to educate. Education is power.
I’m a huge fan of the ideas you have presented here, and I think they serve a great commentary on a different medium of publication than what we have typically discussed in class.