Terms From The Modern Era Of Rhetoric

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Pentad

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D: A method for explaining human motives, this view is known as dramatism
C: Kenneth Burke - 5 components - Agent, Act, Agency, Purpose and Scene. Agent and Act asks the “Whom?” and “What” of the situation. Agency helps to explain how the situation played out. Scene asks where the situation took place while Purpose asks “Why?”
S: The pentad is important in contemporary rhetoric because current theorists use the theories of past theorists to talk about current events. In order to properly understand and interpret the theorist, it is necessary to investigate the Agent, Act, Agency, Purpose and Scene of the theorists’ works.

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Sex vs. Gender

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Sex is a biologically constructed concept that determines whether someone is male or female. Gender is a socially constructed concept that determines whether someone is masculine or feminine, though there are more “classifications” than these two. Gender is a performance that is made through a process of choices. The feminist ideology is that society views males as higher than females. Feminists think this view is incorrect and that both of the sexes are equal. The postmodernist thinks that masculinity is linked to power and agency which furthers the ideology that women are lower than men.

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Politics

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pragmatic understanding of policy. day to day actions: clothes, words shop. stressing practical consequences as constituting the essential criterion in determining meaning, truth, or value.

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Ideology

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The glue that joins attitudes together. It is a widely shared system of beliefs and values, ideologies bind people together in such groups as the religous right, the cultural left, libertarians, liberals, feminist, etc. More fundamentally, ideologies join people of a society together, these systems of thoughts are called cultural ideologies.

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Conscientização

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Portuguese for "critical thinking." Education and social concept by Freire.
Main purpose: to gain an in-depth understanding about the world and resulting freedom from oppression.
Time Period: Individuals were becoming more aware and educated which led them to understand and question more issues.
Excerpt: Freire (1921): Society is based on a hierarchy and has various levels.
In order for society to function properly, people should be conscious of this hierarchy and its levels and need more critical thinking in their everyday lives.
Invention is necessary for a successful conversation (that is both parties have to be aware of the issues they are discussing).
Today: Heirarchy still exists in our society. People may be aware of this hierarchy but they don’t really understand it. Individuals must be conscious of their surroundings.
Useful: Responding to a policy proposition because individuals should be aware of the issue being discuss and how it will effect society in order to pick the appropriate solution.

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Truth

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Move toward argument and interpretation, no longer scientific / rational. A postmodernist would say that truth leads to power. While this is the case, there is the question of “what is truth?” Anything can pass as being truth but the important question people ask is “Why should I believe your truth?” Therefore, a truth claim must be backed up by a lot of evidence.

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Symbolism

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Representing things by symbols or attributing symbolic meanings to objects, events, places or actions. using symbols to represent ideas or emotions through indirect suggestion rather than direct expression.

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Symbolic Action

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using symbols as vehicles to communicate meaning

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Nietzsche

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late 1800s
rhetoric was easily manipulated and could be used to trick and manipulate both people and truth.
Truth: subjective, not absolute. The only truth is power. Attain it at all costs.
Staunch atheist, God is dead, Christian morality is wrong.

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Cixous

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French contemporary feminist
Main focus is freeing the body and voice.
Sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society.
- Relies heavily on Freudian and Greek Mythology in attempts to overthrow the myths that dominate contemporary culture.
The Laugh of Medusa: issues her female readers an ultimatum of sorts: either they can read it and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use their bodies as a way to communicate.
Makes a wide range of literary allusions (common).
Describes the current the state of feminism and the suppression of women, arguing and giving well-fleshed interpretations of her theories, and allowing the reader to interpret and analyze.
Useful: Could respond to a policy, most helpful when responding to a value because her concerns mainly focus on freeing the body and voice.

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Burke

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The use of language to cause action as the primary function of rhetoric
Man as "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection."
Created the Pentad
o Based off of his view of communication and interaction as resembling a drama; this view is called “dramatism”
o Pentad was a way to explain human motive
o Because of the connection between reality and drama (theater), the basic questions we may ask about a protagonist in a play can also be used to analyze the actions of people and situations we encounter in everyday life

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Richards

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rhetoric is "misunderstanding and their remedies."
most important to study how words work
True interdisciplinarian, rarely bothered to respect subject boundaries

unwilling to narrow rhetoric to persuasion. I argued that persuasion is only one of the functions of rhetoric. My new proposal of rhetoric had 3 basic concepts: Mastery of the fundamental laws of the use of language, an art by which discourse is adapted to its end: a study of misunderstanding and its remedies (a non-prescriptive equivalent to general semantics), and lastly I proposed rhetoric as the center of a new understanding. In other words: how words work (or don't) as the central question in the order of knowledge.3

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Grimke

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Abolitionist, Feminist, Christian.
Used it in new way with different techniques that men had not. Audience: women, sometimes men. Used mostly letters to communicate her ideas, which connected to audience on a personal level. Put her reader and herself on the same level. Signed letters - "Thine in the bonds of womanhood" to express a friendly salutation as well as a "women's empowerment" type of message.

Connected feminity with Christianity

Used the Bible to back up her arguments

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Derrida

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deconstruction which questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words.

I have contributed major ideas of deconstruction, of course, along with analyzing sources of meaning such as public reason, common good, human rights and tradition. I have had opposition to many of my ideas along with many other theorists. I would basically take all common ideologies and break them down to the point where they can seem to even oppose themselves.

It was said that I contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture (Borody, pg. 3.)”, arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, sign/signifier, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings

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bell hooks

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that the most unjust and oppressive actions that subordinate women and people of color occur in their everyday lives.

. In reflection, I see how deeply connected that split is to ongoing practices of domination (especially thinking about intimate relationships, ways racism, sexism, and class exploitation work in our daily lives, in those private spaces-that it is there that we are often most wounded, hurt, dehumanized; there that ourselves are most taken away, terrorized, and broken). The public reality and institutional structures of domination make the private space for oppression and exploitation concrete-real. That’s why I think it crucial to talk about the points where the public and the private meet, to connect the two. And even folks who talk about ending domination seem to be afraid to break down the space separating the two” (hooks, 2).

critically assessing the intersection of race and gender during the second wave of the feminist movement through the lens of my works, “Ain’t I a Woman” and “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.” My belief is that one find’s their voice through adversity and fuses personal experiences with rhetoric in order to destroy social constructs that are unjust or oppressive. Coming of age during the second wave of the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam conflict helped me to form ideas and critiques of our society and the function of class, gender, and race within the institutions that are the bedrock of our country.

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Weaver

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a “true rhetorician” tries to uphold an “ideal good” for a specific audience and situation through what he called “poetic or analogical association” (Scotchie, 98). Weaver feels that ethics plays a large role in rhetoric and that a noble practitioner of rhetoric has the obligation of upholding these ethics. The ultimate goal is to combine “action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception”

Weaver’s major contribution to rhetorical theory is his desire for a society of “law and order and cohesive diversity” (Scotchie, 94) Weaver believes “the just and ideal society must reflect real hierarchy and essential distinctions” (Scotchie, 94). A “Platonic idealist”, Weaver states that rhetoric seeks to “perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves”. (Scotchie, 98) Weaver impresses upon the world his view of rhetoric as “persuasive speech in the service of truth” and that it should “create and informed appetition for the good” (Scotchie, 98). In addition to focusing on the ethics of rhetoric, Weaver places a strong focus on new forms of invention and effective style (Scotchie, 104).