Blogging Pedagogy - tropes

Rhetorical Figure of the Day: Introducing Classical Rhetorical Figures in the Modern Classroom

Deb Streusand — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 18:23:28 +0000

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Image Credit:

StaffordGregoire. Original image is here.

As a PhD student new to UT, I came to my teaching at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a knowledge of rhetoric derived from my experience at Mary Baldwin College's Shakespeare and Performance program. Professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught MFA students about the classical rhetorical figures Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school. We studied their role in Shakespeare's text and explored how actors can make use of them in performance. I quickly discovered that this type of rhetoric was not on the curriculum for RHE 306, but I thought my students might benefit from some exposure to it all the same.

I decided to turn it into a sort of warm-up, the “rhetorical figure of the day,” before we launched into discussing the rhetoric of modern controversies. (This exercise would come right after my “morning question,” in which I asked the students something about themselves that was also related to RHE 306’s topic of consumer culture, like “what is your favorite possession?” or “what would you do with a million dollars?”)

I told my students upfront that the rhetorical figure of the day wasn’t something they were going to be tested on or that they needed to memorize. I would be teaching them these things because I thought it was important: I believed it would be valuable for them to recognize the use of these tools in a text or, even better, learn how to employ the figures themselves.

From my students’ perspective, this is what the rhetorical figure of the day looks like on the projector:

Anaphora Slide final.png

I uploaded each figure to the class website, so that the students could refer back to it whenever they wanted. At first, I would select one example from a famous speech and one from a literary text, so that the students could get an idea of the different contexts in which these figures appear. I wrote the definitions myself, but also consulted Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Gideon O. Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae.

For the first two weeks, “rhetorical figure time” went like this:

-Student 1 reads Example 1

-Instructor reads the definition and explains it

-Student 2 reads Example 2

-Instructor attempts to explain what the rhetorical figure is used for and what it does.

Rhetoric is no exact science, however, and so I use “attempts” advisedly. I found it difficult to explain what I thought the rhetorical figures did and how they accomplished it, so I decided to ask the students what they thought instead. After the second student finished reading the above example from Richard III, I asked, “so, what effect do you think the anaphora has here?” I thought I might be faced with silence, but two students jumped in quickly. “It hammers it into your head when they repeat it like that,” said one. And then, oh joy of joys for my nerdy heart: “this is one of my favorites,” said another, “because you start to expect a kind of peak, when they get to the end of the repetition.”

Having the students discuss the effect of the rhetorical figure worked better, but I still felt I could do more to engage those who weren’t speaking up. Chatting with my fellow instructors, I noted the success they’d had getting students’ attention through the use of videos. I started looking around for videos and music that used rhetorical figures. On American Rhetoric, I found some examples from movies I knew my students would be familiar with:

Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

Video of Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

“My teeth and ambition are bared. Be prepared!”

--The Lion King's Scar shows off his zeugma (2:56)

Wizard of Oz

Video of Wizard of Oz

“You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.”

--The Wizard of Oz is also a wizard at isocolon (3:42)

I showed my students clips from these movies in the place of Example 1, and then led a brief discussion as before. What I found was that when playing a bit from a movie, even a short clip, it’s almost impossible to study a single rhetorical figure in isolation. Scar uses three more rhetorical figures in the two lines surrounding the quote above, and the Wizard has a great bit of rhetoric coming up right after the moment I chose. I tried to pause the clip after the part I was interested in, but if I came in even a few seconds late with the pause button, there was already more rhetoric coming our way. I tried to use these accidents to convey to my students how much rhetoric surrounds us all the time.

Meanwhile, my “morning question” exercise was running out of steam, as I struggled to come up with new questions that both had to do with consumer culture and would allow my students to share something about themselves. So, I decided to change up the morning routine by having one student at a time bring in a favorite piece of rhetoric for each day. I started by giving them the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, reading it to them and telling them what I liked about its rhetoric. I hit a snag with the next class because the student I thought had volunteered wasn’t prepared, but then it turned out that another student had gotten excited and had his all ready to go. He had printed out the “Wear Sunscreen” advice column by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune for us, and he showed us a YouTube video of the song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a Baz Luhrmann remix of the column read aloud and the Rozalla song “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good).” He didn’t use the exact language of the rhetorical figures, but he did talk about the juxtaposition between the serious and the comic in the text, and how the alternation between long, complex phrases and single verbs of advice heightened that contrast. The class discussed the effect of putting the music underneath the words of the text.

As I was arranging my next volunteer, a student who hadn’t spoken much suddenly cut in: “I think you said this in the first class, but…why this rhetoric stuff? I mean, I’m never going to use this, so why?” In a movie, I would have had a perfect, inspiring speech ready to go. In reality, I said something like this: “well, that’s a valid question, and I can see why you would think you wouldn’t use it. But these rhetorical figures really do help to persuade people when you’re making an argument, whether you’re trying to get funding for something that you care about, or asking your boss for a raise, any time you want to persuade someone. The reason the figures have such weird Greek names is because people have been using them to convince other people for more than two thousand years. So you may not see it right now, and as I said, it’s a very valid question, but you may end up using these, and if you do, you’ll have an advantage.” If I were writing the movie script for that moment, I might make my answer a bit less financially focused and a bit more idealistic, but at the same time, I think choosing those practical examples might have actually made an impact on my skeptical student. We’ll see when she brings in her favorite piece of rhetoric!

This coming week’s rhetorical figure media samples will come from hip-hop songs, thanks to my Mary Baldwin colleague Angelina LaBarre’s MLitt thesis, “Entering the Educational Cypher: Hip-Hop and Shakespeare in the Classroom.” Future weeks will feature standup comedy and advertising. I’m having great fun with the process of expanding my library of rhetorical figure examples, because I’m still finding new places where rhetoric is hiding. I can’t wait to see what my students bring in over the next few weeks.

Crowdsourcing Narrative Techniques: TV Tropes in the Literature Classroom

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

Author:

Ashley Squires

Image Credit:

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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