Lesson for Week 8: Day 1
8:1
1. Apply some aspect of Rogers' diffusion theory to a person or incident described in Lambrecht's Dinner at the New Gene Cafe.
2. Make an entry in the class blog.
3. Read
Remember that your report of discourse in your field may be published on the website for this class. Perhaps the sense of having a public audience will affect your writing? I know it would affect mine.
As you continue to gather information for your discourse-in-your-field report, you are moving gradually to more and more specific infomation. Your search of the web to get background information was introductory and very general. Your interview, though particular in that you focused on one person, was general in that you were still trying to paint the background of discourse practices in your field. If you had conducted a survey, you would have been able to add detail to this background, but you would still have been painting the background. Now, however, we descend from general information to the analysis of a specific instance of discourse, or you could say that now that we have painted the background, it is time to place the object of up-close analysis in the foreground. The object of up-close analysis could be almost anything--the practices of one person, the practices of one firm, the genre that gets one kind of work done across the profession--but for the class assignment, the object for close analysis is one of the documents from the field that you collected in your portfolio. The document may be long or short, but it should be neither too long nor too short. It should be just right.
The purpose of this analysis to answer the questions, "What does close analysis of one representative document, tell me about discourse in this field? What do I learn about the writer's purpose, the audience's likely reading response, the document's function in getting work done, the common topics of discussion, and the knowledge taken for granted?"
Analysis is the process of taking something apart. You might think of it as dissection. Your subject (or patient) is laid out on the operating table, anesthetized, ready for you to apply the scalpel. The kind of reading you do when you analyze is quite different from the kind of reading you do in order to gather information or to be entertained. Now you are looking for seams, for repetitions, for structure, for strategies--you are assuming the perspective of a scientist. You are not, however, assuming the role of a critic: that would be the next stage. First you read to understand; then you read to analyze; then you read to criticize. We won't be getting to the third stage in this assignment.
In your reading for today, you read two instructional pieces, one by Rybacki and Rybacki and one by Geisler. If you are the type of person who doesn't want to waste anything, you could glean a little more material for your literature review from these two readings because they are really telling you something about standard methodology, and theory about methodology is appropriate for a lit review.
As I read these two pieces, I think of Rybacki and Rybacki as being the more general. In their piece, Rybacki and Rybacki tell you how to get information about the document. Although they don't call their method "rhetorical criticism," that is really what it is. Rhetorical criticism is the process of analyzing a document or speech using categories developed from rhetorical theory and research. In other words, it is simply the process of putting on the spectacles of rhetoric and looking at the subject (or patient).
The portion of rhetorical theory that they emphasize is analysis of the act and analysis of the situation. They talk about these two in that order, which seems backwards to me. To me, once I have chosen a document to analyze, even though I read it several times first to become extremely familiar with it, the first thing I want to do is figure out the rhetorical situation. They do a pretty good job of explaining Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation, discussing the "rhetorical audience," the "exigence," and the "constraints" of the situation. Remember that we have adopted Carolyn Miller's definition of genre in this class, "a genre is a typified response to a recurrent situation." Ah ha! we hear the word situation repeated, and indeed Miller built her theory of genre by drawing on Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation. Rybacki and Rybacki don't make that link in their piece, but you should. Your document is rooted in a situation; it is a response to that situation. If the situation is one that happens over and over again, then you are looking at one sample of a genre. What genre is it? How is it a response to the situation?
They also talk about the exigence, that perceived need that the rhetor (speaker or writer) is attempting to alleviate through rhetoric. I think their characterization is pretty good, but they miss an imporatant part of the exigence. An exigence may be something in history or nature--say the flood of '96 or 9-11--but it may also be previous rhetoric. Someone may have said something that demands a response; the perceived need to respond is an exigence just as much as a catastrophe or an election. A theorist named Mikhail Bakhtin said that utterances are speech acts bounded by previous utterances in their past and expected utterances in their future. Thus, if we expand the concept of utterance to the concept of genre (as Bakhtin does later), we can think of a genre as a typified response to previous rhetoric when rhetoric goes down recurrent avenues (as it often does). The rhetor finds herself in a situation that calls for an appropriate response, but she is not hopelessly bound by constraints; she is creative and can make a fitting response that draws on several kinds of strategies and structures.
It is when we focus on the rhetor exercising the freedom to create a fitting response within the constraints of a situation that we turn from characterizing the situation to characterizing the act of rhetoric. If the act of rhetoric is a document, as it is for this assignment, that means we turn our attention to document to see what kind of strategies it reveals to us. Rhetorical theory has been collecting insights for 2,300 years now, accumulating knowledge by fits and starts, so the ole vessel has become quite encrusted with barnacles. We can't begin to investigate the many facets of rhetorical theory for this class. We'll look only at the most general and elementary concepts, the types of persuasion that come from emotion (pathos), reason (logos), and character (ethos). Read each of these linked explanations so that you understand the terms. You can then begin to look for them in the document you are analyzing. For instance, you could look at the arguments in your document, using Toulmin's system as described in the "logos" link just above.
You can also look at some of the categories Geisler talks about. Although the first few categories she talks about are more in line with the situation (date, venue, organization, author), her later categories are internal to the text (sentences and paragraphs, sections, genre components, metadiscourse). Let me just say that an analysis of sections is pretty closely related to the rhetorical concept of arrangement, the art of arranging arguments in a strategic order to affect the reader's reactions, and analyzing metadiscourse is the art of looking for the writer's signals about certainty, tone, interpretation.
Some times, it is a good idea, after conducting an analysis of the text, to conduct a discourse-based interview, asking the author about strategies you detected and hypotheses you generated about the document. The document you read for today--the questions for the author of . . . would be the kind of general questions you might ask the author of the document you are analyzing. These questions would need to be followed up by more specific ones if time permits.
Finally, here are a couple examples of close textual analysis. Steve Katz analyzed the rhetoric of New Crops, New Century, New Challenges by Dan Glickman when he was Secretary of Agriculture. This link, a rhetorical analysis of David Raup's speech, is one of my attempts to do an extended rhetorical analysis of one document using more esoteric concepts derived from rhetorical theory, namely epideictic theory and its relationship to representation, legitimacy, and authority. The important thing to see about these samples of rhetorical analysis is that they describe the theoretical perspective in the lit review and then apply the theory to close textual analysis (quoting directly from the document to support the claims).
Continue reading for the paper that looms in the future after the present project by reading chapter 13 in Lambrecht's Dinner at the New Gene Cafe and a NY Times editorial on contaminated seeds.
Select a document for close analysis from your portfolio, and write a preliminary rhetorical analysis of it (including discussion of the rhetorical situation and the rhetorical elements of the document itself) and send it to me as an email attachment. If you are still uncertain about what a rhetorical analysis is, take a look at these examples of rhetorical analyses extracted from final drafts.
You should start gathering all of the pieces of writing and research you have done and to begin assembling them into the final draft of you discourse-in-your-field paper. You haven't written your "methods" section yet, but you should be able to do that once you have finished your close textual analysis. The final draft of this paper is due at 9.2. Here's is a discourse-field analysis by Matt Ennis, which he did for this class. It's a pretty good example of what I'm after. Look at his analysis of a document that starts on page 8 of his report to see an acceptable example of rhetorical analysis described in this lesson.