Rhetorical Situation, Genre and Audience

1. Rhetorical Situation, Genre and Audience September 8, 2011

2. Lloyd Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation

3. Oh No! Not Another Definition of Rhetoric! • “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action. The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes a mediator of change.” (4)

4. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts:

5. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence

6. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence • Audience

7. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence • Audience • Constraints

8. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence: “An imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is something than it should be” (6)

9. “Exigence” The 2011 Libyan civil war began on 15 February 2011 as a civil protest and later evolved into a widespread uprising. On 25 February, most of Libya was reported to be under the control of the Libyan opposition and not the government of Muammar al-Gaddafi.Gaddafi remained in control of the cities of Tripoli, Sirte and Sabha.By 15 March, however, Gaddafi's forces had retaken more than half a dozen lost cities. Except for most of Cyrenaica and a few Tripolitania cities (such as Misrata) the majority of cities had returned to Gaddafi government control. On 17 March, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution which authorized member states "to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamhariya, including Benghazi, while excluding an occupation force”.This began a new phase in the conflict. Obama then responded to this exigencewith this speech.

10. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence • Audience: “Since rhetorical discourse produces change by influencing the decision and action of persons who function as mediators of change, it follows that rhetoric always requires an audience” (7)

11. “Audience” Steve Jobs, the (previous) CEO of Apple presents the (then) newest version of the iPhone (4) to an expectant audience. By appealing rhetorically to his audience, Jobs aims to encourage them to buy his product.

12. “The Rhetorical Situation” Bitzer conceives of the rhetorical situation as composed of three parts: • Exigence • Audience • Constraints: “made up of persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify exigence” (8).

13. “Constraints” The Debt Ceiling Crisis: An increase in the debt ceiling requires the approval of both houses of Congress. Republicans and some Democrats insisted that an increase in the debt ceiling be coupled with a plan to reduce the growth in debt. There were differences as to how to reduce the expected increase in the debt. Initially, nearly all Republican legislators (who held a majority in the House of Representatives) opposed any increase in taxes and proposed large spending cuts. A large majority of Democratic legislators (who held a majority in the Senate) favored tax increases along with smaller spending cuts. Supporters of the Tea Party movement pushed their fellow Republicans to reject any agreement that failed to incorporate large and immediate spending cuts or a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.

14. Rhetorical Situation Scavenger Hunt Now we’re going to go out in the world (or, at least, around Williams Building) to see how rhetorical situations occur all around us in different forms. I’ll give your group fifteen minutes to browse around Williams to find three rhetorical artifacts and then discern for each one what its exigence is, what the intended audience is, and any constraints that the artifact presents. I want each group to find one artifact that is primarily textual, one that is primarily visual, and one other artifact of your choice (be creative!). After fifteen minutes, return to the classroom, take a five minutes to organize your thoughts, elect a new spokesperson, and be prepared to share with the class what your findings were.

15. Amy Devitt’s “Generalizing About Genre”

16. What form of media first comes to mind when you hear the word “genre”?

17. What forms of media come to mind when you hear the word “genre”? • Movies

18. What forms of media come to mind when you hear the word “genre”? • Movies • Books

19. What forms of media come to mind when you hear the word “genre”? • Movies • Books • Television

20. But Devitt’s looking further… For Devitt, “genre is a dynamic response to and construction of recurring situation, one that changes historically and in different social groups, that adapts and grows as the social context changes”(580). Genres “construct and respond to situations”(578); they are “possible responses that writers choose and even combine to suit their situations” (579).

21. Consider the Zombie Movie… • First, here’s an earlier incarnation of this genre:Night of the Living Dead. Here’s a movie created in a context of intense race and class conflict…

22. Consider the Zombie Movie… • Then, there’s the post-9/11 zombie movie, 28 Days Later.Here’s a film created in an atmosphere of terror, and ongoing epidemics…

23. But Devitt’s looking further… Amy Devitt writes that“[t]reating genre as form requires dividing form from content, with genre as the form into which content is put”(574). What does she mean by this? What might the implications of such a division for writers? Editors? Designers?

24. Douglas Park’s “The Meaning of Audience”

25. “Audience” “In what follows, I want to open further this problem in meaning, to clarify some of the conceptual traps in the way "audience" is typically used, and to suggest some general reference points that may be useful in thinking about the theory and the teaching of audience” (248).

26. The meanings of "audience,” diverge in two general directions: The Bitzer Camp The Ong Camp . . .the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners” (249). “. . .one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate. . .

27. What does Ong think? “[h]owever real the readers are outside the text, the writer writing must represent an audience to consciousness in some fashion; and the results of that "fiction" appear in what the text appears to assume about the knowledge and attitudes of its readers and about their relationship to the writer and the subject matter. . . More accurately, the writer must create a context into which readers may enter and to varying degrees become the audience that is implied there. (249)

28. What does Bitzerthink? According to Park, “Lloyd Bitzer's definition of the rhetorical situation is a useful reference point here, since it. . .presents external circumstances as forming a defining context to which discourse must respond in fitting ways. The audience, in this view, is a defined presence outside the discourse with certain beliefs, attitudes, and relationships to the speaker or writer and to the situation that require the discourse to have certain characteristics in response. In Bitzer's terms the more structured the rhetorical situation, the more precise its characteristics, including those of the audience, the more it determines the specific features and content of the discourse (248).

29. Audience? 1. Anyone who happens to listen to or to read a given discourse: "The audience applauded." This meaning is inextricably rooted in common usage, but it is useless and misleading in serious rhetorical analysis.   2. External readers or listeners as they are involved in the rhetorical situation: "The writer misjudged his audience." This meaning of "audience" comes into play in analyses of the historical situation in which a given discourse appeared or in studies of the actual effect of discourse upon an audience. 3. The set of conceptions or awareness in the writer's consciousness that shape the discourse as something to be read or heard. We try to get at this set of awarenesses in shorthand fashion when we ask, "What audience do you have in mind?” 4. An ideal conception shadowed forth in the way the discourse itself defines and creates contexts for readers. We can come at this conception only through specific features of the text: "What does this paragraph suggest about the audience?" (250)

30. Reagan as Audience? Ronald Reagan cuts subsidies for mass transit; a committee of mayors drafts a letter to argue for continued support. It is easy to say that Reagan is the audience for this hypothetical letter. But it is not Reagan as Reagan that the letter addresses but Reagan in his position as President and as representative of a set of attitudes on the subject of mass transit. Whatever other notions or knowledge of him as a person the writers may have in mind will have to be screened out as irrelevant. (251)

31. Audience=Contexts? “Here it becomes clear that "audience" is merely a rough way of pointing at that whole set of contexts. One can represent all that in shorthand fashion by saying that the audience is people who believe such and such, or who are interested in such and such, or who have a certain level of background knowledge. But a precise analysis of audience would have to examine, point by point, what is being assumed as understood, what is elaborated, what is assumed as the readers' range of attitudes or preconceptions about the subject at hand, and so on” (251).

32. Chaim Perelman’s “Universal Audience” Perelman argues in The New rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation that “appeal to reason is conceived as an appeal to an ideal [universal] audience—whether embodied in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite” (68). Does this help?

33. Any questions?

34. Rhetorical Situation, Genre and Audience September 8, 2011