At first glance, M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Appeals in Modern Rhetoric looks like a typical college textbook, but it's not. After following the author for four chapters of a rather conventional survey of rhetorical forms, the reader would not be blamed for her confusion when, in Chapter 5, the author makes a calculated detour in "Appeals to Place." Before you know it, what was a fine college rhetoric text has morphed into a subtle environmentalist tract, juxtaposing Western culture to Native American culture to highlight the lessons the former could stand to learn from the latter. It might be argued that, as a rhetoric textbook, this is hardly the appropriate place, regardless of the sound philosophies espoused. Yet, Killingsworth, a master rhetor, pulls if off. How does he do it?
In Chapter 1 he notes the two meanings of "appeal" -- to plead and to please -- both of which are fundamental to the art of Killingsworth's success. First he teaches us how to "plead" through appeals; at the same time, he's boosting the reader's confidence, that is, "pleasing" us by essentially giving us what we expect, and then some. This echoes the author's own citation of Cicero, paraphrased as saying we must "please the members of our audience in order to teach or move them. Rhetoric," Killingsworth adds, is all about bringing these three purposes...together." (viii) Because he's a pleasing writer and a credible teacher, by the end of Chapter 5, we've allowed ourselves to be moved philosophically.
Yet, while his means are clever, he's laying out his own techniques of persuasion chapter by chapter, before the left turn. Using a '70s Ultra-Brite commercial to remind us how advertisers use sex to sell something as mundane (or unsavory) as tooth paste, Killingsworth notes that appeals "always involve direction and usually indirection...Don't think about the dentist; think about your sex life." (10) In this way, Killingsworth, too, is about to play a kind of shell game with us.
In Chapter 2 he shows us the advantages and disadvantages of arguing from an outsider position, and the need (and potential downfall as a result), in modern rhetoric, of "marshalling" an argument with numbers. We're reminded in Chapter 3 of the dual roles both author and audience play (author as a writing person and as a constructed persona, audience as reader and "second persona"). Key to a rhetor's success, she must "push the counterarguments into the background, and encourage the audience members to play along for a while even if they do no adopt the mask that the author has crafted for them." (36) This is how I felt after Chapter 5, fully aware of the "double audience/double author" roles, initially resistant, yet increasingly agreeing with the spiritual-environmentalist notions presented.
Through Chapter 4's accounts of Wendell Berry and Albert Hirschman, Killingsworth brings up writers who posit that "Modern life isn't as good as it appears to be." (41) These are not new perspectives on Western decline. It's simply that sequencing Chapter 5 as he does after discussions on the "futility" of our own culture in Chapter 4, explains why, even though Chapter 5 addresses rhetoric less and Native American philosophy more, he succeeds.
Killingsworth's techniques, alluded to above -- direction and indirection; pushing the counterarguments to the back; encourage the audience to play along -- are essential to his style. But these tools alone might make him seem blatantly manipulative. Actually, he's more clever and subtle than this. After introducing Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives, in which Burke "devised an approach to the analysis of everything from single sentences to complex literary texts and life philosophies," this provides author the ideal justification for morphing a rhetoric textbook, and rhetoric in general, into anything that he likes. (52)
Finally, we're treated to a rich brocade of poetry and philosophy in the fifth chapter, "Appeals to Place." We're told that, where Native Americans have a deep identification with the land and a deep understanding in their rhetoric for place, white man's only identification to place is to conquer the world with globalization.
If the parts of this chapter (per the above) allude to Native American rhetoric, for the most part, Chapter 5 largely steers clear of discussions on rhetoric per se, in favor of celebrating environmentalist poetry. In place of conventional rhetoric, we're treated to nearly fifteen pages of citations from Native Americans like Vine Deloria and Leslie Silko, as well as European-American environmental-spiritual writers like Gary Snyder and Janisse Ray. Admittedly, much of it powerful and moving. After the dismal reports on Western culture in Chapter 4, and the lovely poetry in Chapter 5, I felt like joining the Lakota like that guy in "Dances With Wolves."
Q: Is a rhetoric text book the appropriate place to nudge us toward environmentalism?
Q: If it's true we're "under the spell" of the rhetor, just like the audience watching "The Matrix," like Nero, is it really possible for rhetoric to "wake us up," since it's constantly seducing us or putting us under its spell?
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