They say it’s unbecoming to gush, but I have to say this week’s readings were the most interesting and most applicable I’ve read in some time -- great! As we’re all moving toward our final rhetorical analysis projects, it seems fitting that these four articles are models of rhetorical analysis. At the same time, I enjoyed the common thread of “back-and-forthness” that they advocate as a rhetorical tool and as a dialectical spirit.
For Jackson and Wallin, what’s needed in our teaching of argument is more argumentation, that is, focus on the dialectic process. They point out that we can ask our students to write for the imaginary audience, as Ong suggests, but, in the age of YouTube, this methodology is quickly being outmoded by interactive technology that our students are already using. While the Internet has its share of drawbacks -- anonymity that can give way to mistreatment of interlocutors -- the authors recommend a “crosspollination” of thought (380), a back-and-forthness to develop “hybrid writing activities,” (391) borrowing from in-class rhetorical techniques and YouTube debates, like the one the authors analyze rhetorically following the Andrew Meyers tasing at the University of Florida. I think this is one of the most exciting ideas I’ve ever heard of. I enjoy blogging and occasionally responding to colleague’s blogs. But, as a teacher, I can see where a “hot topic” could capture a kind of passion that probably only comes from a current event. In the same way, Alex has a found a way to do that that gets his students involved in critical thinking and social action through local metropolitan politics. We can all take a lesson from Alex, I think.
There’s a back-and-forthness as well in Wang’s vision of blending Chinese and Western feminist thought to create a new hybrid form, gleaning the best aspects of each. Where Western feminism has a tendency to argue in a strictly binary us/them fashion, still Wang finds some aspects useful; while initial Chinese feminism was loaded with paternalism (written by Chinese men), she’s not throwing it out completely either. More representative of her tack, the article deals primarily with the development of Chinese feminist rhetorical terminology and the rhetorical analysis of Chinese feminist rhetoric as represented by authors Chen and Yang. I found it unusually open-minded of Wang that she refuses to fully embrace the us/them dichotomy of Western feminism, along with what I understand to be the feminist ambivalence toward women’s role as mother and/or wife. From my experience, having come of age during the 70s and 80s, educated women that I knew, whether or not they called themselves feminists, generally rejected traditional women’s roles out of hand, often disparaging women who would “settle” for motherhood as “baby factories.” (In truth, I have no concept of the current feminist platform on this subject, so things may have changed. In fact, until I read Kirsch and Royster, I was under the apprehension that American feminism had faded out.) By contrast, Wang finds Chen writing vigorously to propose new, positive, creative roles for women in the home and beyond. This I find both brilliant and common sense, the opposite of an either/or mentality which, in my experience, has the potential for frustrating men, women and the children they’re raising as well, especially contributing to eroded self-esteem for husbands and sons and a lack of intimacy between husband and wife.
Kirsch and Royster present a rhetorical analysis of American feminist writing, at the same time focusing on the back-and-forthness of dialectics to raise the bar on re-examining feminist literature, to take it beyond “the three Rs -- rescue, recovery and (re)inscription.” (647) Their method involves a closer look at the writings and the women who wrote them (“tacking in”) and pulling back to view the subject from a broader perspective (“tacking out”). (649) Perhaps equally important, they say their methodology is built on the give and take of the personal, “paying attention to . . . intuition and sensory experiences,” e.g. Malea Powell’s visceral reaction to the writing of Charles Eastman, on one hand, and examining artifacts with professional scrutiny on the other (657). I found this passage moving, not so much because of the emotional impact, but because Kirsch and Royster are broad-minded enough to embrace the value of “intuition and sensory experiences,” which strikes me as one of the truly feminine qualities inherent in human beings. Though we all possess it, for me, women have this in an abundance. By contrast, I can’t imagine any male organization insisting on such a feature as fundamental to their methodology. I salute Kirsch and Royster who, like Bo Wang, choose to include this archetypal -- not stereotypical -- feminine element, rather than mistakenly diminishing their femininity by too keenly emulating men, who by and large, don’t even acknowledge such a trait.
If there’s a back-and-forthness to the Enos and Borrowman article, it would be in the subject matter. Like Jackson and Wallin, they’re inspired by the possibilities of using the Web to teach composition, so, by definition, there’s a built-in interconnectedness, though, where the former method teaches students the concept of audience, the latter teaches ways of establishing ethos for online sources. Spotlighting Arthur Butz and his Holocaust denier friends’ websites, the Enos and Borrowman illustrate both the challenges of ascertaining online authors’ credibility and various techniques for discerning the legitimate from the fake. Going back to the topic of our final rhetorical analysis project, this article cleverly models a variety of ways some websites pull the wool over the eyes of the less than savvy. More than a precautionary guide for our students, we can probably all benefit from paying attention to these subtle ploys in the era of the hyper-slick online ruse. We would all do well to read this again to soak up the insight, from the rhetoric that avoids even discussing the Holocaust to the false assumption that Butz is on the level just because he’s a prof at a top university, to the other impressive-looking websites he’s linked to. I imagine there must be hundreds of charlatans on the Internet -- OK, thousands! If that’s depressing at first thought, it’s a reason to smile in that they all provide opportunities for us to teach this invaluable critical thinking skill to our students, using their tricks as teaching material.
I’m curious: What do my colleagues think about feminism these days, and in what ways is it important in their lives? To what extent have they been shaped by feminism? Which has had a greater role in shaping who you are today -- feminism or the Web?
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