Blogging Pedagogy - television

Community and the Rhetoric Classroom

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:02:08 +0000

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Jeff Winger is Socrates’ worst nightmare. As an former lawyer disbarred for having a phony bachelor’s degree, and whose central skill on the NBC sitcom Community is manipulating others’ emotions with his words, Jeff bears out almost all of the concerns Socrates expresses in the Phaedrus and Gorgias about what can happen when training and skill in rhetoric is divorced from a strong moral code.

Quick context before I get back to talking about Jeff’s sophistic wiles (and, eventually, pedagogy—I promise): Community is a show about the increasingly unrealistic/delightful adventures of a community-college study group, and Jeff is one of the show’s and group’s central characters. He’s back in school to replace the fake degree mentioned above, and is usually—though not always—a raging narcissist.

As a narcissist, he frequently uses his abilities in judicial speech to make his own life easier: talking his groupmates into giving him extra help on class projects or tests, talking the dean into giving him credit for made-up courses. And his groupmates, ever more aware of his proclivity, venture observations about Jeff that sound strikingly similar to the observations ventured by the Greek sophists’ contemporaries. Jeff “always [knows] what to say and always [knows] when to slap the table” (“Contemporary American Poultry”); thus—like Gorgias’ audiences—his listeners are “willing but not forcibly made slaves” by his words (Plato, Philebus 58a). When he finds it difficult to compose a wedding toast, his friend Annie is skeptical, observing, “You once convinced [someone] that turtlenecks were made of turtles’ necks.” Jeff concurs, noting, “My superpower is being able to assume any position that suits my purpose” (“Urban Matrimony”). Jeff Winger: 21^st-century master of the dissoi logoi.

And then there’s Britta. Another member of the study group, she alternates between playing Jeff’s antagonist, love interest, and conscience. If Jeff’s superpower is speaking well in support of whatever position serves his purposes, Britta’s is being dubbed “the worst” as she alienates friends and strangers alike with her frequently off-putting commitment to social causes (consider montage #1).

In one episode, as the other characters talk excitedly about the delicious nature of their college cafeteria’s chicken fingers, she proudly declares, “I wouldn’t know. I’m a vegetarian. And if you guys knew how they treated the animals you’re eating, you would eat then even faster just to put the out of their misery. And then you would throw up” (“Contemporary”). By the time her speech shifts gears into a pathetic—and not in the classical sense—lament over her pet cat’s health problems, the rest of the group has gone from rolling their eyes to literally sprinting for the door, dashing toward the promise of a coveted chicken finger. In short, Britta Perry is a supremely ineffective rhetor. But—perhaps not coincidentally—Britta is also the moral center of the show.

Why, you might ask, is this relevant to a blog that is not (yet) a Community fanblog? Because, for me, Jeff and Britta serve as frequent reminders of the diversity of students and student attitudes I am likely to encounter as a rhetoric instructor. There are Jeffs, who might see a rhetoric course as an easy “A,” a chance to show off skills they already possess on the way to the meaningless, bureaucratic credential of a college degree. And there are Brittas, who might actually be better at empathizing with and considering the perspectives of the marginalized, but aren’t skilled at considering their peers’ perspectives in a way that will persuade said peers to take seriously the plights of the marginalized. (And, of course, there are Abeds, Annies, Changs, Pierces, Shirleys, and Troys, but this is a blog post—not a dissertation chapter [yet].) Strong persuasive skills with little ethical support, strong ethical character with little rhetorical savvy, and all point in between.

As a teacher of rhetoric, my tendency is often to valorize the Brittas and dread the Jeffs, feeling—like Socrates—that effective rhetorical instruction without an explicit focus on ethical content risks creating narcissistic manipulators. Despite the excess of credit such a worry likely grants to a one-semester first-year rhetoric course, it’s a worry that pesters me every time a student offers an inadvertently xenophobic comment in a class discussion.

My inclination with such comments is often to jump in with a brief counter-declamation, one that demonstrates—for instance—why men aren’t innately superior to women as college professors. But, in my more reflective moments, I wonder if I’m giving the student-communities I facilitate too little credit. After all, it’s rarely the teachers on Community who effect change in the study-group characters—the students effect change in each other. When Jeff gives persuasive speeches intended to prevent the group’s fragmentation, he doesn’t do so because he’s received in-class ethical instruction. It’s because the sense of community engendered by the group has fostered in him a sense of ethical responsibility for its members’ well-being (cue montage #2).

And beginning to understand her groupmates is one thing that helps Britta better communicate the import of social causes.

Obviously Community is artificial (but hey, so are Plato’s dialogues), so its merit as a ground for reflecting on one’s teaching practices might be doubtful. At the very least, however, I do find it helpful as a reminder of how potent a persuasive influence students can have on each other, and a check on my occasional urges to assume ethical caveats in the classroom must come from the teacher. Perhaps I instead need to leave more time for my students to respond to and complicate each other’s perspectives, myself learning to ask questions that effectively open spaces for ethical inter-student communities, rather than tending towards Socratic monologues that seek to impose morality from above.

Works Cited

"Contemporary American Poultry." Community: The Complete First Season. Sony, 2010. DVD.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1987. Print.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Print.

Plato. Philebus. The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague. 1972. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001. 39. Print.

"Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts." Community. Hulu. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.

Crowdsourcing Narrative Techniques: TV Tropes in the Literature Classroom

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:28:00 +0000

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Ashley Squires

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Randall Munroe

I tend to be one of those lit instructors who rarely brings up the dreaded "literary devices" in the classroom. Too often, handing out a list of tropes and techniques and asking students to recognize them in a text becomes a labelling exercise that does nothing to further the student's engagement with the work.

The wiki TV Tropes has begun to change my mind. A little bit. For those who are unfamiliar with the project (beware, you can while away many an otherwise productive hour on this site), TV Tropes is a wiki that crowdsources definitions and examples of various techniques used in various narrative media: manga, graphic novels, television shows, video games, films, and yes, "classic" literature. The editors describe the tone of the site as "breezy" and "informal," which often makes the entries as entertaining as they are informative. TV Tropes gets referenced frequently in fan communities and on media criticism websites.

What I like about this site is that it encourages both readers and writers to use narrative techniques (many if not most of which have appeared in Intro to Literature textbooks for ages) as a way of engaging with the text and the medium. As the post "TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life" says,

Analyzing a medium in depth and pulling it apart by the seams teaches you to watch things critically--analyzing every aspect and codifying them inside your mind.
Most tropers, academics, directors or writers who so this start to find new ways to enjoy media. The subtle blends of plots, the new spins on old stories. The rare and welcome times where a plot you weren't expecting appears. But it is never the same.
Enjoyment comes from a balance of Recognition and Surprise--we enjoy things that we can relate to and have seen before, but we also like to be surprised. Total recognition is cliche; total surprise is aleinating. Through comparing different works of fiction, browing TV Tropes will merge surprise almost entirely with recognition and you will begin analyzing everything and taking a totally new (and possibly better) enjoyment from media--or reality.

It's difficult to think of a better mission statement for an E314 literature classroom. Rather than labelling devices, learning about narrative techniques and tropes can be a way of encouraging students to think about the expectations they bring to a narrative and how those expectations are shaped by narratives they have already encountered.

The assignment I suggested in this semester's Lesson Plan attempts to use TV Tropes as a way of getting students to connect tropes to their experience with a particular narrative. This could work as a simple journaling exercise or even as a formal essay. Really ambitious instructors might have their students create their own wiki pages describing the tropes used in a particular work and linking them to other works that use those tropes in similar ways.

My interest in discussing tropes and techniques across media began with a student's essay on Dante's Inferno the video game, which is, of course, adapted from the poem, which we read part of in class. This led to a discussion about the ways in which Inferno translates nicely into a video game. Namely, it has a series of defineable "levels" (the circles of Hell) that become progressively more intense until you get to the Big Bad himself, Lucifer. However, a journey through Hell that consists mostly of talking to people and learning stuff about God and the nature of the cosmos isn't actually riveting content for a gamer to conquer, so naturally the game creators translated these levels into boss encounters and reimagined the narrative frame as a hero's quest. Dante is a veteran warrior (maybe sort of true, considering his family's involvement in the Guelph and Ghibeline conflict) and his beloved, Beatrice, is spirited away to Hell by Lucifer, who is much more like a Balrog than like the frozen, crying guy we see trapped at the center of the world in the poem. So, we also talked about how these changes are meeting the narrative demands of video games and meeting the expectations of the gamers.

The lesson plan I contributed this semester takes that conversation and translates it into a formalized activity that could be used for something as simple as a journal exercise or as elaborate as a formal essay or class wiki project. Students should take some time in class to famliarize themselves with TV Tropes and then take a short narrative work home to read. Instructors might provide a list of central tropes they might want their students to focus on but encourage them to explore on their own. Students should then begin identifying tropes within the assignment, connect those tropes to other works (either other class assignments or other narratives that come to mind) and write about how the author's specific use of that trope shapes their experience as a reader.

Some instructors may still find this to be too much like a labelling exercise, but done correctly, I think it has enormous potential to get students to engage with texts on a different level and begin thinking about the works they encounter in literature classes not as self-contained "classics" that have little to do with them or their lives but as texts that are embedded in a set of narrative conventions and expectations that have developed over the course of several millenia.

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