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.