Wanting more

A message of wanting more dominates Villanueva’s essay – from his presentation of theory to his own personal narrative. The story he tells of his educational career and his experience learning to write is laced with his feelings of insecurity, which he attributes to being an older, Puerto Rican student amidst a predominately white college population. His classroom experiences are not always edifying, and despite many setbacks, he yearns for more knowledge. And as he grows and learns more about his own writing and the writing of others, he recognizes a way to help himself and learn to help students in his situation.

Villanueva helped me to see that rhetoric is as much a study of ourselves and other people as it is a study of the words. As he came to that discovery, he seemed to realize “In teaching writing and in teaching rhetoric as conscious considerations of language use, I could help others like myself: players with language, victims of the language of failure.” (77)

He notes that the political power of rhetoric – once legendary in Rome – has now moved into the classroom. And he is determined to use that power.

In a significant contrast to Buck last week, Villanueva identifies with the Sophists – their rhetorical style, as well as their cultural and historical situation. He detects characteristics of their style in his own writing, which helps him to understand some of the difficulties in expression he has faced. To better manage this situation, he believes “rhetorical translation” (88) of his writing sometimes is necessary.

He wants to teach his students, especially those who share a background like his, to be able to rhetorically translate their own writing. But that does not mean he believes in overwriting their work, and he points out “ways of seeing, worldviews, and rhetorical predispositions are allowed expression” (88).

Villanueva ends his essay by acknowledging how much work there is do in this area. And that the cultural gaps between our students may be so wide they (or we?) cannot even recognize them. I felt that his tone of wanting more for his own classroom leaves me with a call for awareness and activism.

Rhetoric and Advertising

One of the most striking things about these readings, for me, was to note that Buck’s insistence that the social nature of rhetoric be taken into account was the same point that Booth is making 100 years later. Over the course of a century, despite all the changes in society, that need seems to remain. Perhaps Booth was aligning his work to answer Buck’s call for a theory to “complete the social justification which rhetoric has so long been silently working out for itself” (217).

I tend to see the modern rhetoric as Buck describes it - with its Sophist, self-centered motives - as best evidenced in advertising and politics. As she writes, “every detail of the speech is to be sedulously ‘adapted’ to the hearer…in order simply that he may the more completely be subjugated to the speaker’s will” (212). As we discussed how rhetoric has gotten a bad name for itself among the general public (the cynical Bart Simpsons, as Sue describes them), I have to wonder whether the Sophist discourse of advertising and politics so dominates society that people have learned to recognize it quite easily. Maybe they even expect it from certain sources, like government officials, big business, etc. In the early 20th century, the citizens of Buck’s time likely were not as media-savvy as most 21st century consumers. (Not to say they couldn’t recognize insincerity when they saw it.) Many people today probably would find Buck’s support for more responsible and ethical rhetoric quite a refreshing change from the typical dialogue that assaults them. Although if she were still alive today, she’d probably be disappointed in our failure to have let rhetoric (and those Sophists!) run so far amuck…

What is Rhetoric?

That's what we're all here to answer. Or not to answer.

I'm looking forward to a semester of intriguing replies!