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Rhetoric and Interpretation. Advanced Rhetorical Writing Matt Barton. The Value of Interpretation. Learning to interpret works of literature and art can help us interpret things like ads, speeches, and terrorism.
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Rhetoric and Interpretation Advanced Rhetorical Writing Matt Barton
The Value of Interpretation • Learning to interpret works of literature and art can help us interpret things like ads, speeches, and terrorism. • Rhetoric can put “literary criticism” to work at understanding “everyday” things that matter to us.
Rhetorical Interpretation • Rhetorically interpreting a poem requires a consideration of • the world it depicts • the world it reflects • the word its audiences reside in. • Rhetoricians consider the circumstances of an object’s creation and its reception over time…History matters.
Genre & Literary Movements • Works that depart from tradition are really arguments for a new definition of art or literature. • Who gets to decide what is “art” and what is not?
Effect of Art • “By reinforcing or challenging values and beliefs, symbolic acts can influence attitudes towards a variety of crucial matters.”
Keatsian Imperative • “New Criticism” emphasizes “disinterested interest” in art and criticism. • Don’t read things “into” works; only read things “out” of them. • “Truth of a work” is found strictly in the work itself; context completely irrelevant. • Leads to a sort of civic detachment and selfishness. • Literature ought to be instead “equipment for living.”
Interpreting Symbolic Acts • Stockhausen: 9/11 was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” • “The journalist in Hamburg completely ripped my statements out of a context, which he had not recorded in its entirety, to use it as a vile attack against my person and the Hamburg Music Festival.” --Stockhausen
Terrorist Rhetoric • If military strikes are designed to maximize the destruction of enemy resources, terrorist attacks are designed to maximize news coverage. • Terrorists use our own media against us (we terrorize ourselves). • The terrorists of 9/11 didn’t get to control how others interpreted their act.
PC • “Political Correctness” concerns an “ideological” vocabulary. • Substitutes euphemisms for traditional terms to avoid offending some people. • Police Officer vs. Policeman • “Learning Disability” vs. “Slow” • 40 BCE (Before Common Era) rather than 40 BC (Before Christ)
Doublespeak • Doublespeak is “evasive language, language that gives every appearance of imparting information without actually doing so.” • “Rightsizing” vs. Laying People Off • “Strategic Withdrawal” vs. Retreating
Neutral Language • Taking a stance against PC usually takes as a given that there’s a “neutral language” available. • Burke argues that “terminologies are lenses through which we see the world.” • These lenses (or “screens”) serve to express and shape our valuation of matters even if we don’t intend them to.
Screens • “Pro-Choice” vs. “Pro-Abortion” • “Pro-Life” vs. “Anti-Choice” • “Estate Tax” vs. “Death Tax” • “Liberating Iraq” vs. “Occupying Iraq” • “Freedom Fighters” vs. “Terrorists” • “Sexual Orientation” vs. “Sexual Lifestyle”
You’re Being Politically Correct • Challenging someone with being PC means doing the following: • Unmasking supposedly neutral terms and showing them to be persuasive claims • Setting up an opposition between a PC term and “what it really says” • Accusing the person of having “an agenda.”
Debunking • It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing everyone else as having an ideology. • We all engage in rhetoric and struggle with competing interpretations of the world, right and wrong, and identity.