Have I mentioned that there always seem to be a million things going on at once?  I think that having a “regular” job might be easier because you do relatively the “same” thing each day… or at least I did.  But here the task list seems longer and more involved, and as much as you want to “check things off”, it really does take several months to ponder, research, and write a paper on feminist dress as expressed through Mad Men. Yep.  I’m doing it.  Right now the tentative title is “Unbuttoning Haute Couture: Mad Men and the Fashion of Liberated Femininity.”

Here’s an excerpt from my reading for class tomorrow… from one of the two hundred pages:

Recall a gradatio of political import, much in the news during the “Berlin crisis” of 1948: “Who controls Berlin, controls German; who controls Germany controls Europe; who controls Europe controls the world.”  As a proposition, it may or may not be true.  And even if it is true, unless people are thoroughly imperialistic, they may not want to control the world.  But regardless of these doubts about it as a proposition, by the time you arrive at the second of its three stages, you feel how it is destined to develop–and on the level of purely formal assent you would collaborate to round out its symmetry by spontaneously willing its completion and perfection as an utterance.  Add, now, the psychosis of nationalism, and assent on the formal level invites assent to the proposition as doctrine.

Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 59

Sometimes I love him, sometimes I hate him.  But a rhetorician must know him and have read him.  So I am.

My students finished week one of special occasion speeches.  Today one girl played a two-minute rendition of her older sister singing “Silver Bells” to prove that she, uh, was obviously not a singer.  We’ve had about five wedding toasts, two graduation speeches, a few speeches of tribute, and even a eulogy.  They are really quite brilliant and, all nerves aside, I think they may be having fun, too.

Apparently we are one-fourth of the way through the semester.  Where has it gone?

Happy Last Day of September!  It is the best month, after all.

Edmund Burke was an 18th-century philosopher, statesman, and one of the foremost political thinkers of his day.  He’s best known for his work Reflections on the Revolution in France and his stance against the uprising.  Russell Kirk was heavily influenced by Burke, and thus many consider E. Burke as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism. 

Kenneth Burke was born in 1897 and introduced a new form of rhetorical criticism in the 1960′s that has forever changed the discipline.  Instead of considering a piece of discourse strictly from straight facts and logical reasoning, K. Burke argued for a new style of criticism based upon his “Pentad”. 

The Pentad is made up of five core components: 

K. Burke’s whole argument revolved around his belief that the world really was a stage, that rhetors took their cues from the audience, audiences responded to the rhetors, and as agents both rhetor and audience contribute to the act, scene, agency, and purpose. 

In a very real sense, E. Burke & K. Burke were polar opposites — one disdained the French Revolution while the other was heavily influenced by Marx and Nietzsche.  One lived in the 18th century, the other in the 20th.  But this they do have in common: they saw the world as a dramatic stage on which the characters spoke and acted and related to one another and participated in a world much greater and far beyond themselves. 

Edmund Burke: “Only by standing on the shoulders of giants have I been able to see so far” and, later paraphrased by Kirk, we are “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.” 

Kenneth Burke: ”Where does the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born.”

Our first reading was Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address and a critique of the speech by Michael Leff & G. P. Mohrmann.  The speech is an excellent example of how to present solid evidence in a clear, logical manner.  This speech is also an example of campaign rhetoric, a speech in which the speaker subtly uses his/her subject to demonstrate his/her qualifications and knowledge instead of focusing primarily on the subject itself.

To be honest, I had a moment of panic while reading the rhetorical critique when I internally yelped, “I don’t know what this word means!  I am confused!  What are they trying to say?  Shouldn’t I, as a rhetoric student, not have a PROBLEM trying to decipher their very argument and manner of speech?  Why did I think this was a good idea?”  But then I took a deep breath and calmed myself down.  Then and now, I try to remind myself that this is a process and I shouldn’t know every word and in fact, it’s a good thing that I’m occasionally confused or unsure of what is going on. 

That is why I’m studying this and why I am in school. 

To learn.  To grow.  To be challenged.  And to persevere.

The first example was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, one of the finest pieces of rhetoric in the 20th century.  I was on the bus, riding home after a long day of work, and I started to read the speech from the very beginning.  It’s amazing and inspiring.

Dr. King reminds you of the past — what the United States of America stands for and what it means to be an American.  Drawing upon Abraham Lincoln’s rhetoric, he uses similar phrases and words to describe the present struggle for equality and freedom.  He uses repetition and vivid imagery to evoke a spirit of hope.

Unlike many great speeches of the past, you can actually watch a video of the speech and exprience the rhetorical situation for yourself.  So take five minutes (yes, only five minutes) and learn from this great master of rhetoric.