RHETORICAL QUESTIONS IN LITERATURE

                                              

1.) What is Bitzer’s definition of a rhetorical situation?

• Although the concept of the rhetorical situation has been examined throughout history, one of the first modern scholars to explore the fundamentals of the rhetorical situation was Lloyd Bitzer. In his thought provoking article, “The Rhetorical Situation”) Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1968) he wrote “Rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem.”  In stating that rhetorical discourse happens as a follow up to a rhetorical situation, he clearly identifies three elements that define every rhetorical situation.

Those elements are defined below.

As Bitzer found, the three elements that comprise a rhetorical situation are exigence, audience and constraint.

• ·         Exigence is defined as some sort of hurdle or action being met with urgency.
• ·         Audience refers to the person or people who are capable of being influences by discourse
• ·         Constraints are comprised of people, events, or objects relative to any given situation provided they have the ability to constrain decision and modify the exigence.

2.) What are the different aspects of a rhetorical situation?

• There is no singular rhetorical situation that applies to all instances of communication. Rather, all human efforts to communicate occur within innumerable individual rhetorical situations that are particular to those specific moments of communication.
• Each individual rhetorical situation shares five basic elements with all other rhetorical situations:
• ·         A text (i.e., an actual instance or piece of communication)
• ·         An author (i.e., someone who uses communication)
• ·         An audience (i.e., a recipient of communication)
• ·         Purposes (i.e., the varied reasons both authors and audiences communicate)
• ·         A setting (i.e., the time, place, and environment surrounding a moment of communication)
• These five terms are updated versions of similar terms that the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle articulated over two thousand years ago. While Aristotle’s terms may be familiar to many people, his terminology more directly applied to the specific needs and concerns of his day. This resource uses more current terminology to more accurately identify the kinds of rhetorical situations we may encounter today. But since Aristotle’s work in rhetoric has been so influential, below is a brief discussion of Aristotle’s terms and how they relate to the terms in this resource (text, author, audience, purposes, and setting).

3.) Which of the issues you encounter today do you think warrant rhetorical discourse?

• Being a form of rhetorical criticism, the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse offers analytical and evaluative readings of narratives and narrative elements in situated discourse or acts aimed at persuading, convincing, uniting or otherwise moving people towards specific ends. It differs from narrative inquiry (as practiced in psychology, ethnography, socio-linguistics and the social sciences) in that the primary object of narrative inquiry is personal/group identity or linguistic competence. It also differs from rhetorical narratology as practiced in literary criticism in that the latter conceives “of narrative as an art of communication” (Phelan 2005a), while the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse works primarily with narratives in rhetorical communication. Thirdly, in methodology as well as in expected output, it differs from theories of storytelling (e.g., corporate communication, branding), when storytelling is understood as the strategic use of narratives: where the study of storytelling draws heavily on quantitative methods in attempts to maximize specific communicative effects, rhetorical criticism combines close reading with contextual analysis in order to arrive at normative judgments.Despite different takes on what delimits rhetorical discourse, most researchers engaged with the study of narratives in rhetorical discourse would agree on a core corpus including, at the very least, all types of political communication, public debate, critical journalism and most types of public address bearing on contested issues.
• Among the relevant genres, found across media and communication platforms, are speeches, presentation material, public dialogue, rallies, blogs, manifestos, constitutions and legislation, declarations, letters of opinion, editorials and demonstrations. An example would be Barack Obama’s 2009 address to a joint Session of Congress on health care. Here, Obama combined the retelling of Ted Kennedy’s experience of children suffering from cancer with a larger narrative of what constitutes the American character in order to persuade his audience to act in favor of the proposed reform. Another example of a rhetorical discourse employing narratives would be Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign (www.kony2012.com). This campaign used videos distributed online to raise awareness and inspire the public to take action toward catching an African war criminal. The controversy surrounding the campaign was partly due to the intense use these videos made of narrative elements, infusing stories of the victims and the story of the perpetrator not only with the story of the rhetor(author) of the multi-modal production but also with a story about the inscribed audience