| Title | : | Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 081735137X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780817351373 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 248 |
| Publication | : | First published January 28, 1991 |
Through history, rhetoric has been understood as the art of verbal influence. This art took various forms and was put to diverse uses. Rhetoric has usually been regarded as the kind of extended verbal discourse found in the public speech, the essay, the letter, or belles lettres, a discourse often founded on reasoned argument in support of propositions.
This conception of rhetoric as propositional, verbal text persisted through ages in which public controversy primarily took oral or written words spoken or committed to print. Issues were debated and decisions were formed verbally; the word was the agency for managing public business. But today the dominance of the extended text and the well-supported line of argument is fading. Public discourse may be embodied in as many words as it was in 1860, but the words take rather different forms. Presidential candidates speak more than they ever have, but campaigns depend increasingly on the twenty-second “sound bite” targeted for the evening news (Hart, 1987). A public that once read newspapers, listened to radios and to the Chautauqua speaker, or conversed on front porches is increasingly turning to various forms of video for information and entertainment.
The place and time of rhetoric are moving inexorably from specific locales in which issues are debated, into the more general context of popular culture. In other words, rhetoric as a distinct social practice carried out during concentrated periods of speaking and listening, or reading and writing, is dissipating into a noisy environment teeming with messages. Rhetorical studies as an academic discipline is responding to these changes in rhetorical practice by augmenting its traditional concerns for extended verbal texts (e.g., Medhurst & Benson, 1984). Students of rhetoric have recently examined the “rhetoric” of the streets, cartoons, and popular music. This book joins those efforts by theorists to conceptualize a kind of rhetoric that is less verbal, or “textual,” and more integrated into popular culture than is the rhetoric of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. The public as well as the academy needs a way to understand the rhetorical dimensions of popular culture.
Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture Reviews
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Read for RSA bookclub, but took notes for me--quite useful argument against just looking at discrete texts. Draws a lot on Marxist thought and KB and some Fisher narrativism, especially in "equiptment for living" and "representative anecdotes." Here are my notes:
Exigent--Interventionalist--conscious, discrete, intentional--A speech to the city council
Quotitdian--appropriational--conventionalized response--"traffic is bad today"
Implicitive--conditional--common sense--driving places should be fast and easy, the govt should impact it
Rhetoric--"politics of the possible" (102), "Social function that influences and manages meaning" (xii), is s "dimension" of all life (38)
Without discrete text, "one of the tasks of the rhetorician is to become immersed in as many bits as possible that might have been available to a person living through a particular rhetoricial transaction" (98-99).
"The critic's task is ultimately to expand the public's repertoire of forms for rhetorical living" (101)
Metonomy is the master trope for public discourse--the individual hostage (27)
In education, we must abandon "giving speeches" and focus on "showing [students]alternative qays to remake the world" (194)
"A concern withe meaning will take priority over a concern with message" (200).
?s
top down vs bottom up metonomy in pop culture
How has chain watching and clips influenced tv narrative response to crisis (14) -
Read the whole book in one day for an assignment and presentation. Brummett states that rhetoricians need to turn away from analyzing discrete texts (ie speeches, essays, etc.) so much and start looking at popular culture as a source of constructing meaning.
Rhetorical critics need to adapt a mosaic model of looking at artifacts. Rather than analyzing the source of the text (ie looking at Lincoln's Gettysburg address), they can shift their attention to the audience and how they construct meaning.
He also talks about the reason hostage stories are so popular in the news: because the media metonymize (or reduce) complex stories into sound bites that people can understand, then promptly forget about.
A good book, laying out a lot of essential ideas about the role of rhetoric in popular culture.
