Rhetorical Perspective

[CJ]

>As I was writing my post yesterday, I wondered if somebody would interpret
>the distinction between method and content this way.

I'm not sure, Seth, where your "Method-Content" model is coming from. In
many discussions of conceptual frameworks for rhetoric I hear distinctions
between various practices which fall in varying degrees of looseness or
completeness under the valance of "rhetoric studies." The rhetor wears many
hats, and so I tend to see rhetoric not as a point of view, nor as a body
of knowledge, but rather an area of study and practice.

The rhetor as practitioner most visibly appears as the graduate of a Law
school in the US. That is, one who is paid and gains her livelihood by
means of *practicing* the skills of argumentation is most commonly thought
of as lawyer, although obviously politicians, advertising executives,
educators, and activists (to name only a few career paths) must by nature
fall into this category.

The rhetor as teacher commonly appears in academia as the Composition or
Communications instructor. Immediately if we agree that teachers use
strategies of persuading and informing to do their jobs, we see the teacher
of writing as one who both practices rhetorical strategies AND presents
these skills to students, who in turn work to a) understand and b) practice
skills involved in the arts of eloquence and persuasion.

The rhetor as critic studies (or perhaps constructs) conceptual frameworks
which aid in the analysis (and almost inevetably, some kind of judgment) of
texts. Though it pains me to do so, I suppose I am using the term "text" in
an extremely large sense, for I have seen graduate students formulate
projects in rhetorical analysis using as primary texts anything from a
Barbie-Doll packaging unit, to the physical environment of a typical
university classroom (sans inhabitants). This is not to resist the
Rhetorical Situation as a valid element of textual analysis. In fact, one
might argue that in our written critical-analytical works, we once again
function as "practitioner," exercising rhetorical skills with scholarly
readers as audience....an audience, I must add, who in turn may use
analytical frameworks from rhetorical theory to form critical commentary on
our own texts.

So to simply state that a text-viewpoint-content area-method is
"Rhetorical" is to some of us merely the statement that a set of
signs/symbols/texts/messages/squawks/peeps/screams/graffiti/lyrics/etc. has
meaning, and can be critically discussed in the terms of any of a number of
conceptual frameworks loosely categorized in the field of language studies
as "rhetoric."

But I ramble. What an interesting thread this has become!

CJ Jeney



____________________________
CJ Jeney
Arizona State University
azcacti at asu.edu


http://www.public.asu.edu/~starbuck/
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