Blogging Pedagogy - rhetorical analysis

Reflections on Racist Comedy in the Classroom

Sarah A. Riddick — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 21:35:12 +0000

Author:

Sarah A. Riddick

Image Credit:

Post Memes. "One of My Favorite Moments From Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Flickr. Flickr, 23 Mar 2015. Web. 17 Apr 2015.

Since I’ve begun teaching, I have frequently described moments in the classroom in terms of trains. A lesson depends upon organic human interaction, and sometimes the best laid plans can produce unexpected results. So, when it comes to lesson-planning, I tend to be an overplanner as a means of minimizing the chances of derailment. That said, asking students to rhetorically analyze a deliberately racist yet humorous text is about as high stakes as this risk of derailment gets.

That said, asking students to rhetorically analyze a deliberately racist yet humorous text is about as high stakes as this risk of derailment gets. Knowing this and knowing that for a number of reasons I believe it is important to ask them to do so, I went about structuring this lesson with caution. First, I selected a timely, accessible, and frankly funny text that is in the midst of making some waves in the media—the new Netflix sitcom produced by Tina Fey called The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This show seemed to me like an ideal entry point for analyzing and discussing sensitive material because it is a colorful, fast-paced, and somehow thoroughly lighthearted sitcom that directly takes on dark topics that range from kidnapping and PTSD to 21st-century racism in the US.

For this lesson (which we resumed intermittently with different purposes throughout the semester), I had students first read a brief online article that softly critiques the show’s deliberate racism. Next, I had them view a few brief clips that best represented the argument that this author was making. In groups, I then had them identify the main claim in the article that they read, as well as respond to that claim with their own reasoning and evidence.

My purpose in doing this activity was fourfold. First, I wanted the students to practice creating a rhetorical analysis between a primary and secondary source because they were currently in the midst of revising a written, individual analysis of this kind. I also wanted the students to experience how others would go about assessing the same two texts so that they could reflect a bit more critically on changes that they might make in their own writing. Third, this lesson ideally would demonstrate to the students that it is possible to thoughtfully talk about sensitive topics such as racist comedy, and a great way of doing so is through rhetorical analysis. Lastly, I hoped that my students would see that performing such an analysis can be interesting and fun, as evidenced by the combination of a Netflix sitcom and a brief critique from a website that they probably visit on their own time.

Like I said, my students were on-board with all of this. They loved the show, and they gave interesting and thoughtful responses from start to finish. Nevertheless, I found myself combatting an everpresent fear throughout the lesson that at any moment, it would become clear that I had put us onto a train with no brakes, and we’d all soon be hurtling down an unfinished track to a messy, (thankfully) metaphorical demise.

What I have realized upon reflection is what I have known all along: the track is always unfinished. As we who research rhetoric know, invention is a core feature of the discipline. Everyday we are inventing in the sense that we are adapting our responses to different circumstances, needs, and goals. As an instructor, I want to give my students the tools that they need in order to respond well to those circumstances. As my students have shown me, they are certainly capable of doing so.

Yes, asking students to discuss racism is going to be uncomfortable on some level because racism is no light matter, and we should not take it lightly. Yes, I will continue to be on high-alert for the moment in which a class discussion might be getting onto the wrong track. However, that possibility is always present in the classroom. What I’ve seen wonderfully demonstrated through this lesson is that my student-passengers are there because they want to get to the destination, too, and I can trust them to get along with each other as we make our way down the track that we are creating together.

rhetorical analysis

Practicing Rhetorical Analysis with Music Videos

Deb Streusand — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 23:24:52 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

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Screenshot by Deb Streusand from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg, Taylor Swift's video for "Blank Space"

In my Rhetoric of Performance class, we begin each class day by watching and discussing a brief performance a student has brought in to share with the class. Since these performances are supposed to be 3-5 minutes, students frequently bring in music videos. With each performance, we do an informal rhetorical analysis.

First I ask the students what they noticed about the performance while they were watching. They frequently make note of things like symbolism and imagery – in other words, they tend to close read the videos. The goal of my line of questioning after that, however, is to bring them away from that tendency and into the world of rhetorical analysis.

I ask the students what they think the argument of the performance is. The argument of a performance is not like the argument of a written piece. With a good piece of persuasive writing, as a rule, everyone should come away from it with the same general idea of what the argument was. With a performance, it’s not a bad thing if we come away with some disagreement as to what the argument might be. The students often debate what the argument is, or bring in a multiplicity of answers, but they never have trouble finding some argument in the piece, even though music videos aren’t necessarily designed to make and defend a claim. One of the principles I put forth in teaching this class is that every performance has an argument. I believe this is true, but making the claim makes me a little nervous, because defending it is inevitably inductive – I will never conclusively prove that every single performance has an argument. However, each class day, my students add credence to my gradual inductive proof of this claim, because they have never failed to find an argument in any performance we’ve watched.

After we’ve wrangled over the argument for a while, we start talking rhetorical appeals. They don’t know that’s what we’re doing yet, though. We haven’t actually entered the rhetorical analysis unit. But we’ve been doing this all semester, from the second class day. By the time they get to rhetorical analysis, they’re already going to be pros at doing it – all that will be new to them is the terminology.

Every day, I ask them: what kind of persona does the performer present in making this argument? What is the intended audience, and how are they supposed to feel? How is the argument supported? What are the current social conversations to which this argument is contributing? Ethos, pathos, logos, kairos – all in a 4 minute video. My students practice rhetorical analysis 10-15 minutes per class day, all semester long. And because music videos are fun to watch and take apart, they have a great time while they’re doing it.

We don’t always watch music videos. Some students bring in short dance pieces, or political rants, or slam poetry. I mention music videos because they would be easy to incorporate into a non-performance rhetoric class as a warmup for rhetorical analysis. To make it simpler, the professor might choose them instead of having students bring them in, to make sure there’s lots to talk about – I always start the semester with Beyoncé’s video for “Flawless,” which has never failed to spark dialogue. The main point is to get the students used to doing rhetorical analysis while talking about something that’s fun.

Discussing Stereotypes in the Classroom

Sarah A. Riddick — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 22:38:50 +0000

Author:

Sarah Riddick

Image Credit:

Ookami-Schiffer. "Don't Stereotype Me!" Deviant Art, n.d. Web. 14 Nov 2014. <http://ookami-schiffer.deviantart.com/art/Don-t-Stereotype-Me-321935197>.

One of my primary aims in a rhetoric classroom is to equip students with the skills to thoughtfully respond to the world around them. What that means, as fellow instructors know well, is that sometimes it is appropriate to discuss rhetorical arguments that make the audience uncomfortable—a discomfort that could potentially halt or hinder discussion in the classroom. Moreover, given that every person in a classroom brings with them a distinct set of past experiences, influences, and perspectives, certain arguments and texts can affect some students more personally than others.

As an instructor, I make a conscious effort to establish upfront a classroom ethos that is founded on respect. We respect each other’s viewpoints, as well as those featured in our discussions, and I encourage my students to maintain this respect throughout the semester. Of course, despite the classroom being a “safe space” for reflection and discussion, it can nevertheless be intimidating for a student to vocalize what they notice in a text, especially when they view the text as stating something offensive. One moment in a recent class discussion of mine illustrated this point wonderfully, albeit unexpectedly.

Having defined some key rhetorical topics (induction, causation, correlation, definition, analogy, and difference), I asked my students to assess a variety of texts that feature these strategies. Samples included two-to-three straightforward sentences, an excerpt from an argumentative article about a recently controversial issue, a series of photographs, and a few excerpts from television and film. One excerpt came from the final court scene of Legally Blonde, a well-known film that continues to circulate regularly in popular culture. Specifically, I chose the moment in which Reese Witherspoon’s character Elle Woods realizes that a male witness in the trial could not have been involved with the female accused, despite his testimony that he had been. Elle comes to this conclusion after the witness, Enrique, identifies her shoes by their designer. After watching the one-minute clip, one of my students eagerly began to speak about which of the topics she observed, but she quickly and nervously prefaced her response with a clarification that she herself did not support what she was about to say.

This is precisely why I chose this clip. This moment at the water fountain is, in my opinion, the film’s defining moment. Elle’s eyes widen, and she runs into the courtroom to inform her team about what she is now completely certain: Enrique is gay. Her argument is, approximately: “Enrique knows designers. Gay men know designers. Therefore, Enrique is gay.” According to my students, Elle draws a correlation between Enrique’s sexual orientation and his knowledge of fashion designers based on a stereotype about gay men. Rather than challenge her argument, the accused agrees with her, adding another stereotype to the mix (Enrique listens to Cher). Thus, Elle, who has been struggleing to succeed throughout the entire film until now, takes over the defense and wins the case.

Legally Blonde came out in 2001. Many might say it was a career-defining moment for Witherspoon, and the film was so successful that it has a sequel and a Broadway adaptation. That said, nearly a decade and a half later, my classroom full of young undergraduates watched this one-minute clip and uneasily recognized the rhetorical power of a moment that until now had likely provoked no more than a chuckle. As my students agreed, the basis of Elle’s argument in this scene—an argument that catapults her to victory in the movie—is both flimsy and based on a stereotype.

For me, this was a wonderful teaching moment. Not only did my students recognize a rhetorical topic at-work, but they also demonstrated an understanding of how far-reaching, significant, and even insidious argumentation strategies may be. To put the aforementioned student at ease, I took a moment to commend her on being conscientious enough to distinguish herself from an offensive argument, and I reminded the class as a whole that in our classroom it is okay for us to talk about what we observe in texts without claiming personal responsibility for them. In fact, that is one of the most important reasons for taking this course: to learn how to respond thoughtfully to others while establishing and maintaining one’s own position.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of ... Learning?

Duncan Moench — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:26:59 +0000

Author:

B. D. Moench

Image Credit:

By Traitrnator

Traditional Art / Drawings / Portraits & Figures

Awhile back I remember reading that, early in his career, Hunter S. Thompson began every morning typing word for word full chapters of The Great Gatsby. At one point in his early twenties, apparently, he’d typed out the whole book multiple times. As with most things Thompson, his friends and colleagues were baffled. When asked “why?” Thompson said “I want to know what it feels like to write something great.”

Now there’s two ways to respond to this: 1) Thompson—who was just as famous for his drug use as he was his pioneering “new” journalism style—was a lunatic and this habit represents just one more quirk to ad to a landfill of quirks or 2) Thompson, who, succeeded in spite (rather than because) of his drug use, had indeed stumbled onto something.

As you’ve probably guessed at this point, I chose the later; and, I decided to test out the thesis on my students. In my 309K course, after their first full paper assignment, many students were struggling with rhetorical analysis. As per usual, many just couldn’t quite get their heads around how analysis is supposed to look. What do you expect? What am I supposed to say? How is analysis different than opinion? What do you mean by “focus on the rhetoric”?

In the past, I’ve found that the best way to answer these questions is to meet with students one-on-one and illustrate, with concrete examples, how their papers are polemical rather than analytical or evaluative rather than substantive. After a bit of instruction most students tend to get the hang of rhetorical analysis and turn out decent work by the middle of the semester. But, with Thompson on my mind, I wondered if there might not be a better, and quicker, way to give students the feel for rhetorical analysis. So, I decided to ask my students to do something — something they, surely, have never been asked to do by a teacher before: copy another person’s work word for word.

I asked my students to take out Lunsford’s Everything’s An Argument (8th ed.), turn to page 108, and read David Brooks’s Times column “It’s Not about You.” After giving them a few minutes to complete the reading, I then asked them to read student Rachel Kolb’s analysis of Brooks’s essay entitled “Understanding Brooks’s Binaries.” Once they finish reading, I ask them to log-in to their nearest computer and open up a Word file and then type the piece word for word. Most students were shocked and I had to repeat myself multiple times.

“Yes, I really want you to copy her essay word-for-word, and, then print it out with your name on the top….give it the title "Imitation Exercise."”

As the class began typing, I surveyed the room and explained that I felt typing Kolb’s words—which are by no means perfect, but certainly competent—would help them not only see, but also feel, how analysis worked on the page.

I started the exercise with about 15 minutes left in the class and most of the students weren’t able to finish in time, so I allowed them to send it to me before the next class session. So far, most of the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of my students have commented that the exercise really helped them get a better feel for what was expected in rhetorical analysis. I have to say that their paper revisions were significantly improved across the board, and, in many cases far more than I expected. It’s worth also mentioning, that, thus far, no students have confused the intention of the exercise in any fundamental way. I haven’t received any papers copying whole phrases from Kolb’s work or, even cutting too close to her text, which, really, would be almost useless, since she is of course analyzing a completely different piece of rhetoric. I highly recommend giving an “imitation exercise” a try.

If you already require Everything’s An Argument, Kolb’s paper won’t require any printing; an exemplary work from a past student, or the edited student essays reprinted in the back of the textbook Critical Situations would work just as well. The key is making sure to have the original piece they analyzed to pair with the paper.

If you give it a try (and it works) don’t thank me, thank HST … and, if it fails spectacularly, please also direct the necessary blame his way as well :)

On Making Your Class Mad: Some Pros and Cons

Meredith Coffey — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:35:05 +0000

Author:

Meredith Coffey

Image Credit:

Plashing Vole

There’s nothing quite like having twenty-one angry people gathered in a small windowless room—especially when they’re all angry at you. Now I know to expect (and to look forward to!) just such a class day when I teach Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 essay A Small Place.

When I initially planned the syllabus for my course, Rhetoric of Tourism, I included Kincaid’s text for remarkably straightforward reasons: it makes an argument about tourism; it deploys a number of different rhetorical strategies to make its argument; and it influenced me tremendously when I first read it for an undergraduate class. And from the beginning, I knew that A Small Place would trigger a strong reaction from my students. The essay opens by critiquing tourists in Antigua, calling them “ugly,” “stupid,” “pastrylike-fleshed,” and so forth; it goes on to draw connections between the colonization of Antigua and the contemporary tourism industry.

In teaching A Small Place, however, I’ve been struck both by the degree of emotion it has provoked in my students, and the differences in their reactions each semester. Last fall, (most of) my students were genuinely offended by Kincaid’s argument. Substantial portions of the text use the second person voice, identifying the reader herself as the “ugly” tourist. Many students either became angry at the text’s accusations (“But I’m not like that! She can’t assume!”) or ashamed (“This makes me never want to travel again!”).

From a pedagogical point of view, there were some real benefits to these responses. We could discuss tone (would the argument have been more effective if it had been gentler on its audience?), distinguish types of appeals (they were all on board with her reasons, but the emotional appeals overwhelmed many students), delve into a nuanced ethos analysis (as an Antiguan, Kincaid is credible, but she seems to have little regard for her audience), etc. At the same time, however, their strong feelings also created obstacles. Some students did not want to finish reading the essay, for example, while others insistently attempted snarky, defensive commentary throughout the class discussion.

Following that experience, I still felt that the pros of teaching A Small Place outweighed the cons, so I included it again on my spring syllabus. To my surprise, however, my second group of students was far less upset by the essay. “She makes a lot of good points,” they said, and, “If I were in her position, I would probably feel the same way.” Despite their less hostile initial reactions, our subsequent discussion annoyed this class in a different way.

After a brief opening discussion, I asked the students to create a single sentence that summed up Kincaid’s main thesis in the essay. (I had my previous class do the same, but I had been much less intent on getting them to cut their ideas down to a single sentence.) They brainstormed as a class, and then I broke them into small groups to construct thesis statements. I gathered their proposed sentences, posted them at the front of the room, and asked them all to vote on which group’s thesis statement most effectively conveyed Kincaid’s argument. I also said that they could revise particular words or phrases within the four or five suggested candidates for “best sum-up of Kincaid’s thesis.” I imagined that this exercise would take twenty minutes at most.

Instead, it took about an hour, and the class was still far from satisfied with the “final” thesis statement. There were definitely some productive aspects of this apparently maddening exercise: students were forced to boil down a lengthy and nuanced argument into a concise sum-up, and the contrasts among the groups’ proposed sentences sparked a thoughtful sub-conversation. (The students’ debate over whether Kincaid’s argument focuses on “tourists” or “tourism,” for instance, was a high point.) That said, the exercise was deeply frustrating for many students; by the end, some were too tired of the activity to care anymore, while others could not stop tweaking the sentence by questioning word choices and orders, which led to some minor bickering.

All this is to say that I’ve used the same text to make two different classes angry in two different ways, and despite some small setbacks, I believe it’s been worth it. Sometimes students’ anger or annoyance isn’t productive, like when they are too wrapped up in their emotional reactions to follow the assigned reading, or when they snap at each other over a verb tense choice. That said, having students cope with demanding material forced them to confront emotional hurdles, difficulties with information synthesis, and other important personal and academic challenges. Moreover, these endeavors—I like to think—also helped them to grow together as a class. I suspect that intentionally making a class mad isn’t for everyone, and it certainly shouldn’t be a weekly activity. But it’s at least worth trying.

Over the Hedge with Nate Silver and Jacques Derrida

Eric Detweiler — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:00:51 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Wikimedia Commons

In October 2012, statistician and New York Times blogger Nate Silver was predicting up a storm. He was aggregating, calculating, and tabulating poll results in order to determine the probable outcomes of the upcoming presidential election. By the end of the month, he had President Obama’s reelection chances at 79%. MSNBC pundit Joe Scarborough was not amused:

“[A]nybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes.”

In his own blog for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates aggregated some of the Silver backlash that occurred in the final days before the election. From Politico’s Dylan Byers:

“For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging. Which, given all the variables involved in a presidential election, isn't surprising. For this reason and others—and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis.—more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.”

And from Dean Chambers: “Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice.”

Coates sums up:

“I don't really know. Anyway, Byers goes on to quote David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, manly-men who can't find San Francisco on a map and are so macho that they chew coffee beans whole, leaving the French press for you ... Terry Gross-listening, Steve Urkel-looking m—”

Actually, I’d recommend reading his post for yourself.

I found Coates’ gloss of the Silver’s critics compelling and astute: The critique often boiled down to the fact that the critic didn’t think Silver was “manly” enough. But there’s also a flip side to this critique: He was also too bold, too bombastic, too reckless in his prognostications. So to the (I would argue significant) extent that such adjectives are linked with masculinity in American culture—political culture included—Nate Silver was branded as both too macho and not macho enough. He’s too confident; he “gives the impression”—but only the impression—of “hedging.” In a way, his hedges were taken as a superficial way for this “man of very small stature” to make incredibly arrogant (at least for Scarborough et al.) claims without proving it on the gridiron like a real man.

At the same time I was following the 2012 election and Silver’s blog, I was also reading a lot of Jacques Derrida’s work, as well as criticism of that work. I found myself struck by similarities between Silver critics and Derrida critics. Slavoj Zizek (whose name, I suppose, arouses as much ire in some academic corners as Derrida’s does in others), for example, states “that in his writing he's seeking ‘simply to make completely sure that the idea comes through,’ in contrast to the exasperating rhetorical adornments he finds—or rather skips over—in a thinker like Derrida” (Nealon). Urban Dictionary’s entry on “postmodernism” is less nuanced and scholarly, but raises a point that’s hard to miss: “pseudo-intellectual Trojan Horse of tyrants everywhere in the western world. Began in Arts faculties in various universities under ‘thinkers’ like Derrida.... Works insidiously by ... dressing up bulls*** in flowery language.” There are those “adornments” again, and this time they’re floral.

Lest I be taken for a “pseudo-intellectual,” maybe I should get to the point. (Or maybe being readily taken for a pseudo-intellectual isn’t such a bad thing?) Though the work of Silver and Derrida travels in relatively different professional and cultural circles, I think readers of both authors miss something important in dismissing vast sections of that work as purely stylistic or only apparent. Brushing off Silver’s hedges as mere “impression[s]” or Derrida’s “rhetorical” use of obscurity—“exasperating” as it might occasionally be—elides something significant. The hedges of both serve important rhetorical purposes, even if those purposes aren’t “to make completely sure that the idea comes through” clearly and immediately. The last two chapters of Silver’s 2012 book are, after all, entitled “A Climate of Healthy Skepticism” and “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.”

But let’s get to the part where I actually say what I mean (pundits, you can start reading here): The various controversies and critiques surrounding Silver and Derrida have made me wonder whether I need to spend more time teaching students to read and write hedges. As a teacher of rhetoric, I am bound up in the tradition of teaching students to “make the weaker argument the stronger.” But perhaps I need to spend more time teaching students to make the stronger argument the weaker: That is, to understand the importance of the prolonged performance of self-doubt as it manifests itself in both the thinking and writing processes of rhetors. To understand that practicing and manifesting such doubts is not just a way of annoying or toying with yourself or your audience, but a way of trying (even if Zizek takes the shortcut straight from the conservatory to the lounge) to get them to dwell with problems, catches, and weaknesses for the sake of fashioning a more incredulously wrought and thus more credible argument in the end. Or perhaps the point is not an end at all, but rather—

Ooh, I’ve gotta go. Fresh Air comes on in five minutes.

Why Teach Popular Culture?

Laura Thain — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:13:09 +0000

Author:

Laura Thain

Image Credit:

Wikimedia Commons

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students. In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet. We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”

“So, what do you want to do, you know, professionally? Do you want to work for TMZ someday?” she asked. I smiled a little and explained that I was a doctoral student studying 18^th century intellectual history and the English novel. She looked perplexed. “Why are you teaching us about music and movie stars and stuff then? Were there stars back then? What does what you teach have to do with being a professor?”

It’s a provocative question. Many of us shy away from studying our “pet” interests in the mass media to make ourselves more marketable—out of fear of entering an oversaturated market of scholars of popular culture. I’ve also heard many of my colleagues voice concerns over ruining what they love by studying it: “I just want to read/listen to/view __________ and enjoy it without thinking about how I can interrogate it!” is a common reprise in graduate offices. But I don’t think we really mean this. In fact, on our Facebook walls, in our informal discussions, and in our lesson plans we examine and analyze the media objects we encounter constantly. We express excitement when we find a particularly glowing example of a rhetorical principle in the most recent broadcast of SNL or The Daily Show. We talk about the ethics of ironic distance in The Colbert Report and Lena Dunham’s Girls. We laugh at memes that mix Derrida with Honey Boo Boo; we eagerly await the season openers of Breaking Bad and Homeland. I even have a fairly well-rehearsed defense of Britney Spears in terms of Barthes’ Mythologies.

At the heart of the importance of cultural studies in general, and popular culture in particular, is the interrogation of the evaluative mode of rhetorical discourse. The controversy model upon which all of our introductory composition courses here in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing are based emphasize three main modes of discourse: the descriptive mode, the analytical mode, and the evaluative mode. These modes represent a cumulative skill set—that is, that one cannot analyze before one can describe, and one cannot evaluate before one can analyze. Within this model, evaluation usually takes place in terms of a position paper on a social issue. For instance, last years’ first year forum book encouraged RHE 306 students to argue for a particular position on school reform; this year, the first year forum topic is oriented toward digital democracy and Web 2.0.

This unit structure transfer neatly into classes that deal directly with public policy—the Rhetoric of Protest, the Rhetoric of Gentrification, or the Rhetoric of Disasters—because the evaluative unit of these course topics easily fits into an argument for policy change. But how do we teach evaluative rhetorics in less civic-minded classes? How do we teach students how to evaluate a music video, a documentary film, or a comedy routine?

Teaching popular culture can be a crucial tool in teaching students how to make the evaluative turn when examining implicit, rather than explicit, styles of argumentation. Because students are often already familiar with the content, they are able to draw on a vast array of cultural associations when formulating their own series of ethical or aesthetic criteria, which is a crucial precondition for adept rhetorical evaluation. It is what keeps students and scholars alike from falling back on response-type criticism alone and seeing larger systems of meaning in media objects. It is what elevates the rhetoric classroom from book club to site of social critique. I believe the most important objective of teaching the evaluative turn in rhetorical theory—as it is in the descriptive and analytical units, as well—is to emphasize the utterly essential concern of audience. In order to do this, we must teach students to think beyond their own personal responses and consider how different rhetorics appeal to others. This process always begins with students learning to recognize these processes within themselves, but they must move beyond this in order to understand the effects of rhetoric in society at large.

The flaw of “book-club” style reader-response is that it is utterly centered on the individual and encourages us to read complex implementations of standard cultural mythic structures for plot, and the actions of the characters within these cultural media objects as somehow changeable. This elicits responses from students such as “If Britney hadn’t driven around LA during the summer of 2007 looking for attention…” or “If Mookie hadn’t vandalized the pizza shop in the end of Do the Right Thing…” in the same way that a reader might muse on the fate of Heathcliff had he not left Wuthering Heights to find his fame and fortune. This sort of response to popular culture undermines the ability of readers to discern that the choices the characters before them make, whether real or fictional, are nonetheless mediated by cultural forces as a precondition for audiences to even understand that a choice was made. In other words, the action and the depiction of the action are the argument; we cannot separate them from each other. Learning to make the evaluative turn rhetorically in popular culture means understanding that we judge the acts of groups or individuals as they are mediated through implicit media arguments; that is, we must teach students to examine with scrutiny the carrier of the message as much as the message itself, because one cannot exist outside of the other. In this exercise, the use of digitally-equipped classrooms is an invaluable tool, because the discussion of the dissemination of cultural myths in media objects is not only technologically possible but environmentally fostered.

Teaching popular culture means teaching students how to read and understand the content and power of implicit arguments as mediated by mass culture. It means deferring knee-jerk evaluative judgments—ones without distinct sets of ethical criteria. It means recognizing and resisting assumptions about the distinctions between high and low culture, and understanding mass media as, at least in some sense, a reflection of, rather than the cause of, cultural attitudes and mores. Close rhetorical analysis of objects in popular culture deconstruct the myths of societal devolution and help us to understand ourselves in our own moment without perspective and without hindsight—all things that make us better readers, better viewers, and, perhaps ultimately, better citizens.

The Shock Factor: Using Heavy Content in Class

Jenny Howell — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:24:55 +0000

Author:

Jenny Howell

Image Credit:

Alicakes*

This semester I’m teaching The Rhetoric of Documentary Films, and I have a very engaged group of students who have various levels of familiarity with the course topic. In fact, one of my challenges in this course is devising class activities that are enlightening for both the person who has seen only one documentary (usually one of Michael Moore’s films) and the person who has seen dozens. One of the ways I have approached this challenge is by showing clips from a wide variety of films: I figure that I will be opening some minds to the diversity of the documentary genre and hopefully introducing others to films that they haven’t yet seen. But there’s one kind of clip that I hesitate to use as a basis for class discussion: the heavy clip, by which I mean a section of a film with a particularly serious, shocking, or uncomfortable subject matter.

I’ll provide some illustrative examples of heavy clips I have considered using: I thought about showing two scenes from Shoah, a 10-hour 1985 film by Claude Lanzmann that consists of interviews that detail some of the Holocaust’s most horrifying incidents. In one scene, Lanzmann speaks with an SS officer who repeatedly asks him not to record the interview or use his name, and Lanzmann agrees, all the while filming with a hidden camera. In another scene, the director interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber who survived the Treblinka death camp by cutting women’s hair before they entered the gas chambers. When the director hits a nerve during their interview, Bomba begs him to stop asking questions: “I can’t. It’s too horrible.” But Lanzmann won’t let him end the interview: “You have to do it,” he tells the barber as the man wipes away tears. These scenes, in my thinking, would provide useful fodder for a discussion of ethos: does it establish or undermine his credibility that Lanzmann lies to one of his subjects and grows hostile with a sympathetic interviewee? Another clip that may prove valuable in class is from Deliver Us from Evil, a 2006 film by Amy Berg that tells the story of Father Oliver O’Grady, who raped and molested 25 children over a period of 15 years. Near the beginning of the film, as O’Grady is being interviewed, the camera refuses to capture his face; instead, it focuses in close-up on his hands. I would use this clip in my final unit of study, when my students turn to making their own film, to teach camera angles. The decision to obscure O’Grady’s face initially and focus in on his hands is a rhetorical choice that my students could usefully analyze and discuss as they determine what kinds of shots and angles they will include in their own films and the effect of these determinations.

Even describing these films in that last paragraph, though, felt a little . . . icky. And that’s really the problem: my fear is that showing any of these clips will be distracting. My students could be repulsed or (worse?) morbidly fascinated by the content, and their usual rigorous analysis will suffer. So why use these clips? Why not show a scene from An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11 that may communicate the concepts just as well?

I can see a few possible reasons. First, at a very practical level, some of these clips simply represent the best, most thought-provoking examples—that I can think of, at least—of the concepts I want to teach. The scene from Shoah, for instance, is so powerful for teaching ethos precisely because it is shocking and serious. Discussing the decision to berate a Holocaust survivor (surely there has never been a more sympathetic subject) could lead to incredibly provocative questions about Lanzmann’s credibility, the purposes of the film, and the rhetorical effects and effectiveness of ethical appeals.

Second, to shock students with heavy clips is also to engage students. These scenes will certainly demand attention and provoke response. The danger, I suppose, is that the discussion may never advance beyond that immediate reaction into analytical thinking. However, if I can manage the conversation so that the foundation is set for critical engagement, then real moments of insight can be had. And, if they are had, the shocking nature of the clips may make this insight all the more poignant and deeply rooted.

Finally, using heavy content provides an occasion to help students move beyond seeing that content into analyzing rhetorical choices and argumentative structure. After all, isn’t teaching rhetoric about developing in our students the skills of seeing through an argument in order to figure out how it’s working and what its intended effect is? This task is all the more difficult when the content of an argument is distractingly uncomfortable, but the pursuit remains a worthy and important one: if they can learn to objectively analyze a scene featuring a Holocaust survivor, imagine what they could do with the heated political rhetoric with which they are bombarded daily. With the correct framing, I think, heavy clips have their place in the rhetoric classroom, and they may even provide a uniquely productive opportunity for analysis and discussion.

Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:35:03 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

DestinysChildVEVO

In order to improve my course design and teaching, I ask my students at each semester’s end for feedback on the assignments and course texts. When I reviewed their responses for last semester’s class, in which I taught an E314L class on Women’s Popular Genres, one text emerged as a favorite: the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women Part I.” I used the music video during the first and second class days to introduce students to formal, historical, and cultural reading practices. It did not surprise me to see them bring this up, as popular culture provides unique material for both rhetorical and literary analysis. The various advantages and disadvantages of the material, however, I intend here to further explain.

In this specific case, I agree with my students. Teaching “Independent Women Part I” helped me disrupt students’ expectations and invited them not only to view close reading but the song itself through new eyes. I showed them the video first with lyrics, inviting them to takes notes on anything they noticed in particular: the melodies, the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, the sets, etc. After an initial viewing, during which they also had the lyrics before them on paper, I asked them to talk about what they had observed.

The conversation that followed was wide-ranging: they not only closely read the material but also put it into larger musical and political contexts. They considered how the song’s lyrics and visuals responded to second- and third-wave feminism as well as the specific cultural experiences of African-American feminists. We analyzed how the auditory and visual elements modeled or engaged with these different “feminisms.” The students read the costumes and the performance in light of both the Charlie’s Angels movie the video promoted and the original 1970s television series. We also considered how the song’s rhyme schemes, verses, and bridge build and draw attention to various phrasings, and how lyrics like

“Question: how’d you like this knowledge that I brought
Braggin’ on that cash that he gave you is to front
If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt
Depend on no one else to give you what you want”

developed tone and invited readerly engagement with the text. While the song was familiar and fun, it was also not so recent that they didn’t struggle to reconstruct some of the cultural context (particularly the late-90s/early-00s “girl power” movement). And while we did not have time to read discussions of Beyoncé’s lyrics from pop feminism blog Jezebel, I gestured to it as an example of the connections between art and larger cultural questions.

This may have been so successful in part because, as I’ve previously described on viz, I’ve taught pop culture texts many times before. I’ve planned three classes—one on the Rhetoric of the Musical and two different versions of Women’s Popular Genres—that have all involved popular culture genres: musicals, novels, songs, or television shows. Through these experiences, I’ve learned about the unique challenges that such texts create. For example, teaching my students about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and other musicals in my Rhetoric of the Musical class allowed us to explore the question of how popular culture has commented on and presents arguments about America and “American values” since the genre’s origins in the 1920s. We were able to read and discuss Bruce Kirle’s analysis of Oklahoma!, which argues that the show attempted to persuade people against isolationist policies during World War II. However, the students struggled with accepting the arguments—they had difficulty seeing how something “silly” or “fun” like musicals could have any sort of cultural implications or intent. When teaching them Stacy Wolf’s essay on Wicked, they were even hostile to the arguments. Their own lack of expertise in music also often left them struggling to articulate their analysis of the material: in other words, while they could characterize the melody as “sad,” they couldn’t generally articulate why. Also, while teaching women’s popular genres meant it was easy to allow the students to write their final research papers on any subject they chose, it also meant they were inclined to work on texts that had not yet been included in critical conversations, like the television show The Vampire Diaries or Katy Perry’s music.

Like I tell my students about writing, teaching pop culture texts is a choice with both advantages and disadvantages. Students are easily interested in them, but sometimes lack critical vocabularies to explore them. Their utility also depends on the assignments for which they’re included. In short, I will always enjoy using Glee to teach kairos, but will be sure to provide them appropriate vocabulary to explore how the text performs kairotically.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.