Nov 6th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Richardson, Pamela. “Agricultural Ethics, Neurotic Natures and Emotional Encounters: An Application of Actor-Network Theory.” Ethics, Place & Environment 7 3 (2004): 195-201. Print.
- This paper arises out of a particular tension between the author and the multiple “actants” that constituted the research subjects she interviewed in a trip to Barbados to conduct fieldwork on the relationship between agriculture and tourism.
- The author uses ANT because it “creates the space to conceive of alternative geographies, imagined as points of connection and lines of flow in the context of a multidimensional spatial imaginary” (196). In other words, the points of connection in the network are constantly in flux (see other article that discusses the flow of the network as transient).
- The author uses four key tenants of ANT in her investigation into the ethical dilemma she faced while conducting interviews: relationality, hybridity, corporeality, and embeddedness.
- ANT, when used in this context, is used to “facilitate an understanding of how ethics are (re)configured in the spaces of encounter.” In other words, ANT is used in this study as a conceptual/interpretive device for the researcher’s experience.
- The author’s quandary comes from her experience interviewing a farmer who claimed that organic farming was impossible in Barbados. Because of her own “ethical baggage” it was impossible for her to imagine any farming that was not organic as ethical.
- This realization led the researcher to the conclusion that ethics are not normative, not ageographical. But conceiving of the situation as an “isolated localism” was just as difficult because . . . well, I’m not sure why. The author never gives a satisfactory description of why here.
- Turning to ANT, Richardson realized that Latour’s theory – with its nature-society, good-bad dualism imploded and reconceptualized as consequences of interaction – might provide a way to discover how entities and their interactions with other entities are “performative, mutually constitutive, and constantly emerging” (197).
- Because of ANTs emphasis that entities are always relational, always unstable and always in the process of becoming, ethics must also flow through networks – ethics must be in motion and consequential rather than static and determined.
- Deontological = considering acts and not consequences when determining the ethics of an event.
- Tying Burke and Latour (or Latour with Latour – depending on where you draw your definition of identification), the author notes that all encounters are negotiated. She says, “Corporeality and hybridity of identity were constantly negotiated in the process of establishing identification” with her research subjects (199). This process of deciding who to be was “always unstable” and in a sense, becoming – kairotic.
- All of the dilemmas faced by the author could be said to be a result of Callon’s term “entanglement.” As a result, “decontextualized rationality” in fieldwork is an impossibility.
- ANT allowed this author to quit asking questions about what is ethically “good” or “bad”; rather, ANT helped her understand HOW ethical identities are always emergent. Thus, ANT allows actors to renegotiate their ethical identities in relational – instead of normative/universal – contexts.
Sep 18th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Richard Leo Enos
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 25. No. 4, 357-87
This piece is a collection of reflections by noted rhetoric scholars on the development of rhetorical analysis. In the general sense, most of the writers situate their understanding of the genesis of the field in terms of the following authors: Wichelns, Black, Bitzer, and the explosion of authors during the social reclamation efforts of the 80s and 90s. To move forward, I’ll highlight the speaker and key points from each.
1. Richard Enos:
a. the study of discourse in the social context is the greatest achievement of rhetorical criticism.
b. early 20th century conceptions of rhetoric excluded anything that wasn’t “nonmimetic, civic discourse that was agonistically performed before immediate audiences” (362).
c. New methods of rhetorical analysis developed as the “province of historical rhetoric dilated to include other types of expression” – namely women’s, A.A., etc.
2. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell:
a. Barriers to rhetorical criticism: it’s conceived in Aristotelian and Ciceronian terms.
b. Cross cultural use of these elements of rhetorical criticism: credibility
c. Principles of rhetoric: a)rhetoric is ubiquitous, b)rhetoric is indigenous – linked to cultural histories, values and traditions, c)rhetoric is the study of language.
3. Andrew King:
a. The revival of rhetoric as a study of inquiry was the result of the revival of civic infrastructure in the early 20th century and was brought to full bloom by the Progressive era.
4. Celeste Condit:
a. Adoption of “empathy studies” as research method. Empathy studies asks that the researcher “begins with a modicum of openness and uncertainty and simply tries to lend as empathetic an ear as s/he possibly can to multiple voices. The goal is not to promote one “side” of the discourse over the other, nor to synthesize, though either of those may sometimes be the product. The goal is to construct discourses on can best embody (whether at the social or individual scale)” (370).
b. This listening process will reveal sites of rhetorical investigation that aren’t oratory – namely bodies and the “broader ecologies in which we swim” (370).
5. Richard Jensen
a. Social movement rhetoric began to develop as a response to the inadequacies of neo-Aristotelian methods to account for the irrational aspect of protest rhetorics of the 1960s.
b. Bowers and Ochs “The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control”
c. Jensen asks that rhetorical critics of the 21st century “combine current theories of rhetoric with traditional theories used in previous movement studies to explain how new technologies. . . have impacted the role of leaders and the organization of movements” (374).
6. Sonja Foss
a. Agency as Rhetorical Criticism
i. Step One – Select an artifact.
ii. Step Two – Choose how to analyze or interpret the artifact. You can choose a scripted interpretation and apply it to an artifact to see if it works, or you can use an artifact from which you will draw interpretations.
iii. Step Three – Sharing criticism – Share your work with others and see what sorts of other interpretations develop.
7. Martin Medhurst
a. Defines rhetoric as “a mode of thinking, doing, and ultimately, being. Rhetoric is a mode of analytical thinking that helps the critic ask important questions and explore significant dimensions of public culture” (381).
8. David Zarefsky
a. Developing the idea that “method” could/should be substituted with “attitude”
b. Suggests using two questions to enact this ‘tude: 1)What’s going on here, and 2) What about it?
c. Suggests revisioning the artifact of the rhetorical analysis not as text, but as object.
9. Jennifer DeWinter
a. Context is key to rhetorical analysis – not just “criticism.”
b. Some rhetorical criticism methodologies:
i. etic methodology – “In the etic approach, the critic is concerned with generalized statements about rhetoric that are derived from well-defined methodological procedures” (392)
ii. emic methodology – “The emic approach, on the other hand, is completely situated within one rhetorical situation as it is contextualized in culture and history, thus the observations or patterns described can only be valid in relation to that one particular setting and cannot be described by a generalized theory that is imposed on a particular rhetorical situation” (392).
c. Recommendation of longitudinal studies - uses Darwin’s evolutionary writings as an example of how rhetoric is longitudinal.
d. Rhetorical criticism, regardless of method, should serve a purpose.
Selzer, Jack. “Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding How Texts Persuade Readers” in Bazerman, Charles, and Paul A. Prior, eds. What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004.
I thought, to some degree, that I practiced rhetorical analysis when writing. This chapter confirmed that knowledge. Selzer breaks up rhetorical analysis into two camps: contextual analysis and textual analysis. Though at the end of the chapter Selzer recommends NOT separating the two forms of analysis, in his guide to rhetorical analysis he does so for illustrative purposes.
For both forms of analysis (but especially for textual analysis) Selzer relies heavily on ancient rhetorical vocabulary/method. He recommends using/considering:
a. types of rhetoric (deliberative, forensic, epideictic)
b. cannons of rhetoric (inventio, dispostio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio)
c. appeals (ethos, pathos, logos)
d. dispostio’s components (exordium, narratio, confimatio, refutatio, peroration)
Foss, Sonja. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989.
In Chapter Two of this oldie-but-goodie, Foss lays out a very programmatic way to conduct rhetorical analysis. I’m going to use a lot of bullet points here:
a. The Overall Method
- i. Discovery of the Rhetorical Artifact and Research Question
- ii. Formulation of the Critical Method
- iii. Critical Analysis of Artifact
- iv. Writing the Critical Essay
Discovering the rhetorical artifact and research question
- a. artifact and question simultaneously as impetus
b. Discovering the research question
- a. random stimulation (hokey?)
- b. alternative perspectives (see artifact from other perspectives)
i. perspective as particle (constituent parts)
ii. perspective as wave (how does artifact work with spatiotemporal change?)
iii. perspective as field (how does artifact function in field?)
i. definition
ii. comparison and contrast
iii. cause and effect
- d. reversal (pursue opposite direction/understanding)
Formulation of the Critical Method
- b. Create a method from an existing concept (what I usually do!)
Content of Analysis
- b. description of artifact
- c. description of critical method
- d. report of findings of the analysis
- f. evaluation of findings
- g. contribution to rhetorical theory (did you revise the field as a result of findings)
Stance or “How I learned to deal with socially constructed realities”
- a. Argumentation (detailed, reliable description)
- b. Coherence (is it understandable for your reader?)
- c. Acknowledgement of subjectivity
- d. presentation of choice
After giving us the low down on the method of “doing” rhetorical criticism, a lovely essay follows that describes E.T. as the embodiment of mythic transcendence in the face of postmodernity.
Rhetorical Analysis – Fahnestock and Secor
A nice definition of rhetorical analysis is provided at the beginning of this chapter. F&S note, “Because it is based on a view of language as a medium of communication and not a system of representation, it assumes that speakers and writers have intentions or designs on readers and hearers, and it seeks to identify the verbal means typically used to achieve those intentions or designs” (177). F&S go on to recognize that NO language exists without purpose and as such, there are no “innocent exchanges” in language.
After recapping the ancient rhetoricians that were covered adequately by Selzer in the Bazerman piece, F&S take up some Roman tenants of rhetoric. They illustrate the stases – or the ancient taxonomy of issues (fact, definition or quality/value) as well as taking up the topoi or Aristotle. They also address the notions of high, middle and low style. Making mention of Burke and the “New Rhetoric” of Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman, F&S recommend the following four basic characteristics of rhetorical analysis:
a. Rhetorical analysis pays attention to the who, when, where, and probably why of a text
b. Rhetorical analysis uses an identifiable vocabulary drawn from the rhetorical tradition and/or from a particular school or theorist
c. Rhetorical analysis identifies language choices that serve the rhetor’s ostensible purpose, or perhaps, depending on the interpreter, his or her unconscious or subverted purposes
d. Rhetorical analysis seeks to uncover the argument of a text.
After concluding an example analysis of a piece by Stanley Fish, F&S recognize the rich history of “discourse analysis” on the sentence and word level; however, they make sure to note the subjective/invested nature of the researcher in that endeavor.
Sep 14th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Chapter 2 : Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories – Phillip Eubanks
Main Claims / Executive Summary
In this chapter, Eubanks sets out to reclaim narrative and metaphorical criticism from the hands of “traditional poetics” in order to recognize how influential narrative and metaphor are to the creation of meaning in daily life.
To achieve this, he begins by grounding the all-pervasiveness of narrativity in two areas: 1)the metanarratives of postmodernity and 2) the claim of cognitive scientists that we use narrative to “conceptualize experience and organize memory” (36). After providing a methodological account of his work, Eubanks concludes by noting how the tension that develops between narratives of distributed cognition (stories/cognitive frameworks that allow people to think and work together ) and narratives challenging those cognitive frameworks provide ideal sites for further investigation.
Turning next to metaphor, Eubanks relies heavily on Lakoff and Johnson’s work to demonstrate how metaphor is also central in the process of cognition. In his exploration of metaphor, Eubanks demonstrates how the literal referent and the metaphoric term interact to create new, altered meanings that extend the metaphor beyond the Aristotelian conception of metaphor as “alien name.” Through an extended analysis of interviews with former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Eubanks illustrates how image schemas (abstract referents that structure our understanding and reasoning) develop conceptual metaphors through which we can “gain insight into the ways people think – the way they approach their professions, the way they construct their culture, the way they understand themselves” (46).
Eubanks closes by noting how other traditionally literary tropes, like metonymy and irony, also deserve an extended treatment to see how they are enmeshed with one another in the production of meaning through language.
Methods/Methodologies
Narrative Criticism:
Eubanks recommends a close, critical reading of a text with an eye toward what sort of stories are being told. First, he performs a couple of reads to identify all of the “stories” being told in a piece. Next, he classifies each of the stories into larger story headings. For example, stories about developing software and stories about the Internet would be classified as “business-development stories” (37). After performing the story-finding and classifying exercise, Eubanks attempts to demonstrate how those stories construct the subject. In so doing, he also recognizes how the individual/entity/organization hasn’t constructed themselves, and, perhaps, how others have.
Metaphorical Criticism:
In performing metaphorical criticism, Eubanks notes that he intends to 1) consider the relationship between prominent conceptual metaphors and 2) take into account their problem setting and argumentative functions (45). Eubanks again recommends a close, critical reading of the text with an eye toward all of the metaphors that are developed. After collecting the metaphors, he recommends placing them into analytic categories. Next Eubanks recommends deriving a conceptual metaphor from the collected analytic categories. After doing so, Eubanks notes that the application of image schemas can allow the researcher to differentiate the importance of the deployed conceptual metaphors – and inherently allows us to note how that individual/entity/organization constructs themselves metaphorically.
Key Words/Phrases/Concepts:
narrative
metaphor
metonymy
metanarrative
cognition
conceptual metaphors
image schemas
distributed cognition
cognitive frameworks
Key Citations
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Questions/Challenges (I hope these are relevant!)
1. To some degree, narrative criticism seems to be an extension or application of Burke’s dramatism. Is the narrative a symbolic action or a way of knowing? When performing narrative criticism, aren’t we also trying to figure out human motives? Anyone else see analogs?
2. Speaking of motives, how do we account for ruptures that occur when narratives aren’t probable? In other words, what happens if we’re working through narrative analysis and the stories being told don’t jive with our lived experience and don’t fit or conform into analytical frameworks? How do we, as researchers, negotiate this difference? Does it even matter/is this even possible?
3. What happens if we begin to find strings of archetypal metaphors (light-dark, life-death, sickness-health, etc.)? Doesn’t this seem to challenge the idea of recursive/self-inscribing metaphors on the literal-referent/metaphorical term model? Is this even relevant?
4. The entire metaphor criticism process is a little unclear to me. I have especial difficulties with the relationship between image schema and conceptual metaphor. Any help?
Sep 4th 09
Posted by justin in CCR691, rhetorical criticism
Composition Research Agendas in the 1960s and 1970s
Richard Lloyd-Jones
History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition, 1963-1983
This relatively short piece discusses one veteran rhet/comp professor’s experience with administering writing research for national organizations like NCTE, NAEP, and other groups during the 1960s. In his introduction, Lloyd-Jones notes a key theme that is spun throughout his essay: namely, that all rhetoric is political; hence, all writing is also political because it is about delivery.
L.J.’s research team started by working through dissertations to provide legitimacy for composition as a field that needed research. As a result of this work, L.J. and his team were told by Braddock that “composition, in comparison with research in the physical sciences, was just emerging from the age of alchemy” (75). L.J. also mentions that the field was so young that the researchers often shared their knowledge of the field with one another, creating a “essentially oral quality” in composition studies until the early 1970s.
L.J. notes that there were many problems with the tests initially used by ETS to rate students writing. First, the writing prompts had no rhetorical purpose. He also noted that the prompts, while attempting neutrality, often had class or gender bias. This created specific responses from different groups of writers. These biases, combined with the inadequate training of the graders, created pretty poor research results.
In retrospect, L.J. notes that he learned a lot in his participation in this study because of a recognition that gender, class, and S.E. played determining factors on the kinds of work the team received in their research. He also rails against the administrators, politicians, deans, and others that expect hard data at the expense of more accurate yet ambiguous answers.
Introduction and Chapter
Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan
Methods and Methodology in Composition Research
I found this piece to be really useful. In the first couple of pages, K&S offer some useful definitions:
1. Method – a technique or way of proceeding in gathering evidence
2. Methodology – the underlying theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed
In addition to these definitions, they pose a series of questions that researchers should heed:
1. What problems emerge in the process of inquiry, and what issues are raised by a particular methodology?
2. What constitutes data?
3. How are data used in producing knowledge, generating theories, and building models?
4. What kinds of questions can and cannot be answered with a given method of research?
5. How does the researcher resolve these problems and issues?
After noting that qualitative research poses serious problems for the researcher-to-subject relation, and encouraging researchers in rhet/comp to use multiple research methods, K&S get to the really useful part of their introduction: how to do effective, productive research.
While rejecting the claim that adopting a single methodology would be the best thing for the field (10, 248 – North & Irmscher), K&S argue that the “plurality of perspectives . . . may be taken as a sign that we are growing more confident in our identity as a research community and that we are beginning to understand the complexity involved in adapting research methodologies that have their origin in vastly different disciplinary traditions” (10). In arguing against the single method system, K&S offer these reasons:
1. single methodology research “determines what is included in and excluded from the study of composition”
2. “to declare one methodology most suitable for composition studies is to declare other methodologies less suitable, less valuable, and less intellectually worthwhile” (253).
In arguing for methodological pluralism, K&S offer the following grouping in favor:
a. the diversity of research questions raised by scholars
b. the broad territory encompassed by rhetoric and composition
c. the multidisciplinary backgrounds of researchers (255)
In carrying out methodological pluralism, K&S encourage an open discussion of :
a. the researchers relation to the subject (the researcher’s presence and authority are never neutral)
b. the purpose of the researcher’s questions (they must be grounded in the subject’s experience and be relevant to the subject)
c. the researcher’s agenda (it is never disinterested) (256)
Later in the article, K&S make mention of the POMO conception of methodology. The note:
new approaches to research also reflect the current discussion of the socially constructed nature of knowledge that has been central to poststructuralist debates of the last two decades. Poststructuralist scholars in a variety of disciplines have argued that all research is limited and partial, shaped by the cultural and historical context of the researcher as well as by the participants, and that the meaning of research is constructed, not discovered (Kuhn, Geertz, Rorty) (260)
More Methodological Matters: Against Negative Argumentation
Ellen Barton
CCC, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Feb. 2000). pp. 399-416
In this article, Barton laments her perception of how the field of Composition is increasingly pushing away empirical, quantitative research. She frames this shift in the rhetorical tactic of “negative argumentation” or the arguing against unnamed, but implied subjects. Barton’s contention is that qualitative researchers are falsely accusing empiricists of using “traditional, imperialistic hegemony” in their research practices (401). Furthermore, because quantitative researchers don’t incorporate collaborative and reflexive design and analysis their work is ethically suspect (401).
Barton ties this shift in research to a the field’s emphasis shifting from product to process. This likely explains why Tom Newkirk is the focus of much of her invective (not that it’s not deserved). In this shift, Barton claims that the field looses a couple of things:
1. the devaluation risks losing sight of the ethics of empirical frameworks, thereby exacerbating the continually simmering conflict with regard to nature, place, and value of empirical studies
2. in devaluing empirical studies, the field may lose it’s ability to ask certain kinds of questions about oral and written language and the complexities of its production in various contexts.
3. as a result of devaluing empirical research, the field may lose its ability to make appropriate methodological choices for investigating problems of value, thereby impoverishing the methodological education we offer to new practitioners in the field (403).
The Making of Knowledge in Composition – Introduction
Stephen North
In the introduction to his book, North recounts a personal experience that led him to a disciplinary question. After working with a student for some time in preparation for exams, North probed his student about wide-ranging disciplinary questions of synthesis and analysis. Unfortunately, because of the somewhat unorganized and messy nature of the field, the student couldn’t answer the questions . . . and neither could the examiner. This is what ultimately led North to trace the development of Composition as a field through an analysis of specific individuals and professional organizations.
Some useful definitions:
a. modes of inquiry – the whole series of steps an inquirer follows in making a contribution to a field of knowledge.
b. methodological communities – groups of inquirers more or less united by their allegiance to one such mode, to an agreed-upon set of rules for gathering, testing, validating, accumulating, and distributing what they regard as knowledge (1)
In the first chapter, North traces the evolution of composition as a discipline. He grounds the founding of Composition (with a capital C) in the education reform movements of the post-war period. Instead of working with Progressive educational principles, the reform movement sought to use English (the tripod – language, literature, and writing) to meet the responsibilities of being a world power – especially in light of how Sputnik demonstrated Soviet intellect and capability.
In addition to demonstrating the history of the discipline, North also notes how Composition, since it’s very inception, has had something of an identity crisis. This crisis is manifested in the results of the Braddock essays (alchemy metaphor), the kinds of knowledge that the field was going to privilege and the kinds it would exclude (for example, the Practitioners), and the unclear aim of the Composition course (service course, expression? what to do?)
