Class has been a much-needed break this past week. As I walk out of work and into the sunshine and frigid air, the stress slowly melts away and I enter into another world and place.
I’m no longer juggling twenty different balls. I become a critic, investigator, lover of rhetoric. My nine classmates (or colleagues) and I engage in discussion and sometimes debate with Dr. Persuasion and each other. Yesterday another student raised the question of if women put on make-up and enjoy dressing up because it’s inherent in their nature, or if society has decided that is what women do. What is the “discourse” surrounding femininity and how does it impact our culture? I’m never bored and always challenged. I love it.
We’ve also been exploring the role of a critic. What does it mean to “critique” a piece of rhetoric or public discourse? What does it mean to be a critic? We boiled it down to a few points, although the list could be unending:
- A good critic shows you something about the piece of rhetoric/discourse you wouldn’t notice at first glance.
- All critics have some sort of bias, a looking-glass through which they view the work. You can’t escape from your individual perspective and because criticism encourages a diversity of ideas, your perspective becomes one voice in the “Chorus of Criticism.”
- A piece of criticism is an academic editorial. As the critic, you conduct research and then write about what you discover. Yes, you gather facts, but you share these facts from a personal opinion.
- A good critic helps his/her audience understand his/her position and point of view before the critique. This provides an appropriate framework from which to consider the critique as its own piece of discourse/rhetoric.
This weekend I’ll be putting on my “critic” hat as I delve deeper into the events surrounding Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.
Starbucks and a grande, nonfat, no-water chai, here we come!
