Length: at least 1000 words (roughly 4 double-spaced pages)
Due Dates: 7.17.15 (proposal), 7.20.14 (rough draft), 7.22.14 (final draft)
For our second assignment, you will deploy the terms, concepts, and mindset of rhetorical analysis to illuminate some rhetorically interesting or significant specimen in particular: a music video, an advertisement, a bumper sticker, a speech, a photo, a billboard, an email, an editorial cartoon, a poster, a blog post, and so on. Rhetoric, as we have articulated it thus far, is not a genre or subset of writing but a force that all writing (/speaking/visual images/etc.) deploys, intentionally or otherwise. Your task here is to understand and articulate the rhetorical dimensions of the object you choose to analyze—the effects it has on its audience and on the world around it, the way its immaterial words or images or sounds exert material force on the world—whether those rhetorical dimensions are deliberate or not, whether they correspond to the object’s intent or not, and so on.
You should be thinking here about things like audience, ethos/pathos/logos, context, genre/expectation, intent, and effect. We seek here not just to understand whether a given rhetorical specimen is appealing or successful or effective in some general sense (“a great speech,” “a successful advertisement”), but to unpack how it is working rhetorically, to what ends, for what audiences, under what assumptions, and so on. The question, as always, is not what the thing in front of us means, but what it does. What are its moving parts? How does it affect its audience? What is its force in the world, intended or actual? What is the gap between its intended force and its actual force?
The task of rhetorical analysis is to break down its object and think about each of that object’s components (design decisions, word choices, publication venues, and so on) as choices rather than as inevitable, natural features of that object. The analytical mind always remembers that every aspect of its object of analysis could have been otherwise, and that therefore the individual features of that object always have particular sets of effects (effects that are different from the hypothetical effects of different design choices). Often, the easiest way to make analytical headway is to ask what the effect would be of this or that aspect being different from how it is: what if this image were in color? What if this text were narrated in the third person rather than the second person? What if this had circulated in print rather than online? What if the voiceover were delivered by a woman rather than a man? What if it were directed at this audience rather than that audience? By breaking down your object of analysis into a series of non-inevitable choices, each of which has concrete and identifiable effects, you will be able to think of it as a kind of rhetorical machine, its various parts working in concert with one another (or sometimes working against one another!) to produce an experience in the audience.
The analytical task also requires that you be more charitable than you might otherwise be inclined to be. If you don’t like a particular rhetorical specimen, or if it makes you angry or uncomfortable, that shouldn’t be the end of your analysis—it should be the start, the catalyst, the thing that tells you this object is worth analyzing rather than merely consuming and abandoning. If there are design choices or rhetorical choices made by the creator of your chosen object that rub you the wrong way, instead of immediately dismissing them as bad or ineffective choices, try to think about what rhetorical purposes they might be serving and what effects they might be having. This doesn’t mean you have to pretend to like or respect your object of analysis more than you actually do. It just means that in-depth analysis depends on generosity—generosity in the sense of a willingness to spend time with a particular object, thinking about it and taking it seriously, interacting with it more deeply and thoughtfully than you might in “the real world.”
Some questions to think about, to kick-start your analysis:
For what audience does your object of analysis seem to be intended? Where did it appear? In what medium? How well does its intended audience match up with the actual set of people likely to see it? Has it “gone viral,” or could it? What would its effect be on people who might be likely to see it but aren’t necessarily part of its intended audience?
What are the expectations/conventions of the medium/context in which this piece appeared or took place? Did it appear online or off? On Facebook? In a magazine? If so, what kind of magazine? Who are its subscribers? Did it also appear in the online version of the magazine, or only in print? Are people who don’t subscribe likely to be exposed to it somehow? Did it appear on a billboard? If so, where? Who’s likely to see it? How does this object compare to other objects in similar contexts? How does it fit with or deviate from the expectations someone might have?
How does your object of analysis affect members of its audience overall? What are its pathos effects, its effects on an audience’s emotional state? Does it affect some members of its audience differently from how it affects other members? What specific formal or aesthetic properties can you attribute those effects to? Are there aspects of the object that have effects different from an audience’s overall/dominant impression of the image? What rhetorical purposes do these emotional effects serve? Do they enhance or detract from what you judge to be the piece’s overall rhetorical aims? If the piece makes you angry, is there a way you can understand that anger as serving a rhetorical purpose, rather than as a careless and stupid failure on the part of someone who is obviously not as smart as you?
What explicit purpose is the object serving? Is it an advertisement? If so, is it obviously an advertisement, or does it mostly hide its commercial agenda? Is it a piece of political rhetoric of some sort? Is it a public service announcement? Did it end up serving different or bigger aims than it was initially intended to serve (e.g., many documentary/news images are captured without much of a rhetorical agenda but end up being used for various rhetorical purposes after the fact)?
Does the piece operate purely on pathos impact, or does it have an implicit or explicit argument (a logos appeal) to it? If so, what is the logic of the argument (e.g. “here is a cool person, and if you consume our product, you will be cool too, so maybe get with the buying!”)? If it’s an advertisement, does it make any particular claims about the product being advertised, or is the image largely disconnected from the product and more concerned with branding (ethos) or emotional impact (pathos)? If it’s a piece of political rhetoric, how much does it focus on promoting a particular logical argument or set of claims (vs., say, stirring your emotions or making you trust the “brand”)?
Is there an ethos component? If it’s an advertisement, is there a brand visible? How prominent is it? Is there an actual or implied spokesperson? Is the point to sell the product or to sell the brand? How much does the object seem to care about what you think of its creator (or of the person or people appearing in it, if they are standing in some way for the company or organization represented)?
What does the object want you to do after you’ve seen/read/heard/encountered it? Is it primarily trying to change the way you feel or think about something, or is it trying to get you to take a particular action (buying a product, voting for a candidate, ceasing some behavior)? What is its desired rhetorical impact? What is your impression of its actual rhetorical impact, for any audiences likely to encounter it? If there is a gap between the two, to what choices can you attribute that gap? Are there different choices the creator(s) of the image could have made, regarding some specific components of the piece? What costs and benefits would there be to those different choices?
What larger issues, phenomena, or debates does this rhetorical specimen resonate with or shed light on? For instance, does it open up conversations about the use of sexual attraction in advertising, or the use of fear in politics, or the importance of branding? Does it contribute to or push against larger trends? Does it have things to say about those larger trends, or is it merely riding the wave? This is a version of what we might call the “so what?” question: if everything about your analysis of this particular object is true, so what? What are the consequences of your argument about this particular artifact? What broader insights does your analysis lead us to? What bigger things can you hook this object and this analysis up to? (I’m not looking for “since the dawn of time, mankind has been subject to rhetoric, bla bla bla”; I’m looking for a sense that you’re thinking broadly and nimbly about how the arguments you’re making here might be important to people other than the guy grading your paper.)
Consider, too, your voice in this paper. The task is analytical, but that doesn’t mean your writing has to be dry. If anything, the point of being trained in various kinds of analysis is to be able to say things that are more interesting, more thought-provoking. Intellectual curiosity of the sort required to spend a lot of time with a particular object, asking lots of questions about it and taking it seriously, is not opposed to producing stylish, interesting, or funny writing. It is very much of a piece with those things.
You are certainly not beholden to the five-paragraph essay structure that I’ve spent so much time in class bemoaning. Again: analytical doesn’t necessarily mean dry or uninteresting. Although I’m not requiring you to have an explicit thesis statement sentence at the end of your introductory paragraph, you should be very clear about what you are and aren’t arguing—and your essay should be more than a checklist of answered questions. Your writing should not just answer the series of questions listed above; it should use those questions as a jumping-off point to produce a coherent and cohesive account of the object you’re analyzing, and of what larger issues that object brings up. Good analysis opens up avenues for further thought, which is to say that ideally, your analysis here could serve as the start of a conversation, not the end of one.