Rhetorical Perspective

[Seth L. Kahn-Egan]

CJ's post points out a shaky conception on my part.  See below for
clarification...

Seth Kahn-Egan
Syracuse University
PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
slkahneg at mailbox.syr.edu
315-423-8042 (home)
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> 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.

I'm not entirely sure I see a major distinction between "point of view"
and "area of study and practice."  Both are spatial metaphors that
delineate rhetoric and other fields of study.  Do you mean by "area" a
discipline?  Or some other kind of category to be distinguished from
others?  Or am I missing the point (which wouldn't suprise me--Sudafed has
way of catalyzing misunderstanding)?


> 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.

I agree to the extent that we define "rhetoric" as "persuasion."  But if
we shift or enlarge the scope of "rhetoric" to include other forms of
communication, then this notion of practitioner may be overlimiting.


> 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 important part of this argument, to me, is the second sentence, which
essentially labels the teacher as a particular kind of practitioner.
Since the teacher's goal (ostensibly) is to help/teach students take up a
particular set of ideas, is this version of "practitioner" really any
different in its goals from the lawyer or the ad exec?

> 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.

To be repetitively reductive, I would argue that this formulation of the
"critic" is again not really much different from the "practitioner."  I
make this point based on your choice of the word "constructs."

> 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."

Although you frame this as a conclusion to your response to my post, I'm
not sure we aren't saying the same thing.  Maybe the rub is my use of the
term "method" to describe rhetoric--there are a variety of rhetorical
analysis methods.  Maybe a better term would be "process," although that
term has been metaphorized to such an extent that it's nearly meaningless.
Actually, I'm not really happy with "process" either.  What I'm trying
to get to is a formulation that captures rhetoric as a kind of activity
that may operate through a variety of procedures (or something like that).

I should also go back to the term "content" to describe composition.
Instead, as I think more about it, I would propose a term like
"philosophical posture" as the frame within which this particular
conception of rhetoric operates.

Hope that helps.  Or provokes somebody else (!)...

Seth