Inspired by being asked by many people the question, “What is rhetoric?”
This isn’t my definition. That will be a later video. For now, this serves as my attempt to articulate the three major understandings you’d encounter in the university scene.
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Here are some thoughts I had the night that bell hooks passed away. I had just finished teaching and was in my classroom and thought I would share them orally. This is not exhaustive nor complete but reflects my feelings at the moment. Comments welcome!
Many years ago when teaching public speaking at Syracuse university, a student gave a speech about her spring break in Amsterdam. Consuming mushrooms every day, they decided to go to the zoo where they promptly learned they were on exhibit for the animals. Unable to escape, they sat on a bench and wondered about their new life until the zoo staff told them to leave at closing time.
A memorable speech but not for the correct reasons. Needless to say, it left a mark on me as a master metaphor: What side of the bars am I on? Supercharged by Freudian thought, I always am aware that anything I’m viewing is looking back whether I want it to or not (or even if I’m aware).
I’m writing today as I have been doing most every day of January recess, trying to get some things in the hopper for publication, and I realized (again) that it’s pretty useless to fight against my writing process. I am full of (paralyzed by) shoulds and ought to’s and other such dicta to the point where i just stare for long periods of time at a screen and click around in Reddit or various Discord servers.
Here’s my major should: I should want to sit at my desk and use my very nice PC with 24 inch monitor to write, in silence. I should be able to do this in the evenings before bed.
What my process really is: I have to use this very particular Chromebook model, at my dining table, with books around it all opened to a particular page, but placed page-side down on the table in a semicircle around the laptop. I need pretty loud classical piano music as well. And I need to make sure I don’t eat anything all morning (starting as early as possible) until I am pretty certain that I have tapped out where I want to be on the page – or to a place where the backspace key is being tapped more than the letter keys.
This reality also involves a lot of coffee and water, and occasional visits to the internet to see what other books about my topic I could buy and have sent to me. I’ve been lucky in the sense that if I dedicate my morning to writing, the after-lunch to evening shift can be about reading and notetaking. I’m not a very good afternoon writer, but I can sew a lot of productive seeds – or create prep for the writing kitchen for the next day’s cooking quite well.
Am I a prisoner of these habits? Most assuredly yes, but only because of perception. At some point I am asked to leave the zoo, and I can get up and walk out of the exit. However, to fight that perception is to miss a lot of time where I could be taking in the animals, the exhibits, the day, the words, the thoughts, the other things we need in order to write. I can just resign myself to being stuck, and consequently be on the right side of the bars of the writing habits most every time.
This is perhaps the most influential book on my thinking, which I picked up as an undergraduate from the Texas A&M bookstore. That copy is not this copy. That copy is full of highlighter, pencil marks, and several colors of pen. I let a student borrow it for the winter break. This one is one I found for sale at the Syracuse University library, when they had a shelf of books for 1 or 2 dollars right near the main entryway. I wonder if that shelf is still there.
The New Rhetoric is dismissed out of hand by contemporary rhetoricians mostly because it feels old. It’s slow. It has a lot of antiquated examples. It’s not really something that we are used to reading in my field. Most of the time, attention is on the latest political speech or Netflix special – and definitely not on a book that maps out a better way to think about arguing in the social spheres of life.
I wonder though if the book could be redone. Or reupholstered. Or needs a new frame. Not sure what the metaphor is here – the book does from time to time feel like it needs a flush and fill.
Although the aspects of life where we argue are well chosen: Politics, Philosophy, and Literature, there’s a real difficulty in getting the points they want you to get simply because we are not up on what’s circulating among French-speakers in terms of books in the 1950s. Part of me feels the examples are drawn about 50-50 from what’s being read now and what any good French culture school student would have been exposed to in high school or if they had attended university for a bit.
This doesn’t help us with the book – the examples are a bit too far out there. So I’ve always wondered if it could be re-written with some contemporary examples. I’ve also wondered if it could use a new translation. I don’t read French so I’m not sure how good the translation is (or how necessary a new one would be).
Or someone could write the New New Rhetoric, and just update all the things that Chaim and Lucie are saying. There’s a lot in the book that has remained untouched by most American rhetoric scholars and would be more investigated if it was made a bit more accessible.
So here are my ideas with the book:
An Example Companion Guide: This would read like David Harvey’s great books on reading Capital, something you could take a look at to help you understand what’s being said in contemporary terms in each section of the book.
A more modern English rendering: Take the translation we have now and update it to contemporary American usage of English. This book is written with the French “reading public” in mind and the translation seems a bit musty at times. Might be better to reword the English and note that it’s not really a high-fidelity translation.
A graphic novel: This is mostly just an excuse for me to buy manga-making software or Visual Novel maker or something ridiculous. But it might not be a bad idea to try to create something graphic about this book to highlight some of the most important parts of their theory. It’s being done with very oversimplistic and harmful renderings of fallacies and evidence and things like that, so maybe this would be a good counter? Definitely outside of my wheelhouse and comfort zone, but isn’t that what audience adaptation is?
A “How to Debate” Guide: Aimed at undergraduates, a book about how to construct and deploy arguments without getting frustrated or upset would be a good contribution across the university. This might be the easiest of the projects here.
I’m slowly drafting a lecture series for YouTube about The New Rhetoric so hopefully I can start filming that in the new year. As for now I’ll keep reading and taking notes.
I’m liking making this vlog, and I hope you like watching it. Let me know if you want me to cover anything in particular. I’m just sort of going down my list of annoyances and interests related to pedagogy, rhetoric, and life at the university. I’m open to anything you think might be interesting to hear about.
In this episode I talk to people on discord about the idea of student-created rubrics for various purposes.