What Does Homework Look Like?

Read this overview about Edwin Black.

My assignment for yesterday was to write a response to his article on John Jay Chapman’s 1912 speech.

So… this is what homework looks like:

In his essay on rhetorical criticism, Edwin Black describes the fundamental differences between neo-Aristotelian criticism and dramatistic criticism by examining a speech by John Jay Chapman in 1912.  While neo-Aristotelian criticism views rhetorical discourse as “tactically designed to achieve certain results with a specific audience on a specific occasion,” dramatistic criticism considers the act as one which takes place in the midst of many surrounding acts, agents, and settings.  While neo-Aristotelians ignore the long-reaching implications of a piece of discourse and tend to focus on the here and now, dramatistic critics take into account the long-term impact on both the rhetor and the audience, even looking towards audiences in the future.  

Black states that Chapman’s “Coatesville Address” would be difficult for neo-Aristotelian critics to analyze because it lacks a persuasive, logical style and did not produce any tangible results.  However, to the dramatistic critic, the speech can be considered as an act during a period of U.S. history when citizens were attempting to make sense of the lynchings, discrimination, and racial violence which many considered the norm.  By considering the cultural, political, and historical scene, we then see the profundity of Chapman’s words.  Instead of measuring Chapman’s audience as the three people present at the actual address, Black argues the direct audience “is all of those who are influenced by the direct audience.  This dialogue has not ended, but still continues, and insofar as the model of the United States is increasingly influential in other parts of the world, the potential audience to this dialogue grows larger.” 

Not only does the speech call into question the “norms” of the day, but it is a “symptom of an intricately moral interpretation of American history.  It is the token of a complex of judgments, attitudes, and discriminations so manifested that the auditor is passed beyond the surface of the discourse and confronts its resonant implications.” 

We could never gain this perspective from a strictly neo-Aristotelian criticism.  It is only through viewing Chapman’s address through dramatistic eyes and as product of a moral genre of rhetoric that we can appropriately discuss the actual influence and results of this speech.