I have time and time again been hearing students in my classes talk about how we can talk and talk, yet none of us are doing anything. At first, comments just annoyed me, but as time passes, and I hear it repeated, I am left with a single question: Why is the quest for understanding and the spread of information through discussion, in order to discover how rhetoric (or any other subject matter) affects an issue such as humanitarian intervention not in itself an action toward solving the problems that have plagued humanitarianism for years? Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged Rhetoric
The last month or so has been crazy and chaotic to say the least. Thankfully, however, I am starting back up with regular attention paid to Comic Corrective and its readers without boring you with the details of why it’s been so long. Now, I’m writing from a classroom in Oglethorpe University’s Robinson hall, listening to Dr. Rosenthal lecture on the hierarchical nature of categorization of language as discussed by theorist Kenneth Burke, the father of the very concept that inspired this blog in the first place.
Hierarchy always creates tension between those who are up and those who are down (an inevitable fact within the nature of hierarchical organization), Burke calls these tensions guilt. We then use language as a tool to decrease that guilt, or “redeem” ourselves. As much as some would like to think this guilt-redemption cycle is some sort of theoretical and mystical thing that real people don’t really think about or deal with in a practical way, it is. It is a part of every instance of interpersonal communication.
In those communications, we create a sense of group identity or commuity by using Burke’s ideas of identification and division, focusing on ways someone (or a group) is the same or simmilar to the audience (or whomever you are communicating with). This strengthens relationships between ‘us’ can redeem out guilt by knowing that we are not ‘them.’ Otherizing is a way that, sometimes without even realizing it we scapegoat, even in the smallest of situations, if we can blame a ‘them’ from our problems, and then cut them out of the party, the event, the conversation…whatever it may be…we can breathe a sigh of relief as if we have gotten rid of “the problem,” whether that individual or group was really at fault at all.
As a college student, and even more as a member of a sorority, I spend at least part of every introduction to a new person answering the same safe, cliched ‘ice-breaker’ question: “So, whats your major?” Quite honestly, each time it makes me just as uneasy as the time before. The answer seems it would be an easy one until it actually emerges from my mouth: “I’m a Communication & Rhetoric Studies major with a double minor in Gender Studies and Philosophy.”
Now, I will readily admit that much of the disgusted, nauseated expression that seems to be the repeated reaction is a little bit my fault. After all, I did provide more information than I was asked for, but all three of those disciplines are very important to my studies and goals for the future. The only silver lining in that dark cloud I like to call “smile and nod, then turn and run” is that those who are brave enough to continue a conversation with me ask: “What does ‘rhetoric studies’ mean anyway?”