Transcript Contemporary Rhetoric and EAP Writing

Rhetoric, Critical Reading, and
EAP Writing
施 雪 清
國立嘉義大學外語系
1. Define critical reading
2. Define rhetoric
3. History of rhetoric focusing on
contemporary rhetorics
4. The rhetorical qualities in academic
writing
Ways of gaining knowledge
• Non-critical reader:
by memorizing the statements within a text.
learn facts.
• Critical reader:
what a text says + how the subject matter is
said.
Appreciate a particular perspective and a
particular selecting of facts can lead to
particular understanding
What is Rhetoric?
From Ancient Greece: formal public speaking (political,
legal, celebratory speech making)
To Any spoken or written form of nonliterary discourse
(many would include a great deal of literary discourse.)
• The art of persuasion:
George Kennedy: “the energy inherent in emotion and
thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including
language, to others to influence their decisions or
actions.”
• Employing symbols effectively.
achieving the purposes of the symbol-user—persuasion,
clarity, beauty, or mutual understanding.
Characteristics of rhetorical discourse
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Planned
Adapted to an audience
Shaped by human motives
Responsive to a situation
Persuasion-seeking
Concerned with contingent issues
Social functions of the art of rhetoric
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Rhetoric tests ideas
Rhetoric assists advocacy
Rhetoric distributes power
Rhetoric discovers facts
Rhetoric shapes knowledge
Rhetoric builds community
History of Rhetoric
1.
2.
3.
Antiquity: Plato; Aristotle; Cicero
Middle Ages: Augustine.
Renaissance: Erasmus; Italian humanism.
–
Peter Ramus (1515-1572, the turn toward dialectic).
skeptical about the value of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s treatment
of rhetoric and dialectic
humanistic studies: studies to the development of a free
and active human mind—rhetoric, poetics, ethics,
politics.
Rhetoric in timeline.doc
4. Enlightenment:
5. Contemporary
Cicero’s five canons or categories of oratory
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Invention
Arrangement
Style
Memory
Delivery
A pattern for rhetorical education
A template for the criticism of discourse (..\
美人腿節.jpg) and
Invention: finding something to say;
what is to be said.
Arrangement: how one orders speech
or writing.
Style: the artful expression of ideas;
how something is said;
The Enlightenment
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
late 16th C—early 18th C
Logic, dialectic, and mathematics
Managerial view of rhetoric
The discovery of knowledge through reasoning, as
opposed to “the communication of knowledge” in
earlier period.
Issac Newton (1642-1727): physical laws governs the universe
John Locke 91632-1704): empirical basis of human knowing
David Hume (1771-1776): rational operations of the human mind
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): theory of government
centered on the individual citizen.
• Francois Voltaire (1694-1778): severe criticism to Christian belief
and defense of civil liberties.
18th and 19th Century Rhetorics
• Giambattista Vico on Rhetoric and
Human Thought
• British Rhetorics
The Elocutionary Movement
The Scottish School
Richard Whately’s Classical Rhetoric
• Vico: the rhetoric of imagination
1. intuitive poetic
2. The need for education in arts of practical
decision making about matters that did not yield
to scientific analysis, such as morality, law, art,
politics.
3. The decisions are contingent.
Rhetoric in British education:
1. Christian apologetic, preaching and writing
2. Shift from oral to written discourse
3. English became the language of scholarship
4. Women admitted to the universities
5. Urbanization—change accent for personal
advancement in the bigger cities.
The elocutionary movement
• Public life:
Speech marked one as belonging to a
particular social class
rhetoric as an important skill in professions
such as law, politics, and religion.
Rhetoric for upward mobility. (speaking good
English
Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788): Irish actor;
Emphasis on delivery.
The Scottish school
• The Belletristic movement: Lord Kames and
Hugh Blair
 Belles lettres (beautiful language from France)
 Study of literature, lit criticism and writing
 Focus on the examining the specific qualities of
discourse and their effects (on readers and listeners).
 Taste, style, beauty and decorum
 Help students develop the qualities of taste,
eloguence, critical acumen, and style with the goal of
“living the good life.”
 Pursuing personal grace, leisure enjoyment and
social advancement.
George Campbell (1719-1796)
• Incorporate 17th, 18th Century British philosophical
thoughts
• Eloquence + psychology
• Seek a science of eloquence
• Mental faculties: Every speech is intended to
♠
♠
♠
♠
enlighten the understanding
please the imagination
move the passions
influence the will
• Persuasion is a matter of addressing both the emotions
and the reason
Richard Whately (1787-1863)
• Traditional logic and rhetoric: like Augustine, Cicero,
Quintilian, and Renaissance humanists; art of promoting
and defending divine truth.
• Types of reasoning: Scientific and Moral
 Reasoning from evidence to more or less probable conclusions
on practical issues.
• Theory of persuasion:
 to excite some desire or passion in the hearers
 to satisfy their judgment
• Education in eloquence:
 Elocution: the ability to speak with grace, force, and clarity.
 Argumentation: defend a proposition with sound inference and
solid evidence.
The 20th century
• From the end of 19th century to the beginning of
the 20th century, the study of rhetorical theory
had reached its lowest point.
• Scientific thinking was ascendant.
• However, scientific thinking could not provide
solutions to human problems like aggression,
racism, economic exploitation, and others.
• Toward the end of 20th century, scientists
started to admit the discourse of science was not
formulary, clinical, and syllogistic but decidedly
strategic, argumentative, and rhetorical.
Contemporary Rhetoric I: Arguments, Audiences, and
Advocacy
• Chaim Perelman and Madame L. Olbrechts-Tyteca:
The New Rhetoric—universal, particular, audience of
one, self as audience.
• Stephen Toulmin: The Uses of Argument—analyzed
everyday or marketplace arguments and drew legal
cases to establish his system for assessing arguments.
• Application of Rhetoric in scientific inquiry, economics,
anthropology, social psychology
• Criticisms of the Rhetoric of Science
--What are the qualities that make academic
disciplines rhetorical?
--Advocacy
1. Choice of a project and the presentation
of a rationale for research
2. The field of science is a collective
enterprise sustained within a highly
specialized network of communication
3. A part of public discourse; technical
information is available to all of us.
Contemporary Rhetoric II: Rhetoric as
equipment for living
• Kenneth Burke : identification; symbolic inducement;
terministic screens and being human.
• Lloy Bitzer: rhetoric as a response to a particular kind of
setting, and as structured by that setting in predictable
ways.
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Polyphonic Novel; relationship
between rhetoric and narrative generally.
• Wayne Booth and the Rhetoric of Fiction
• Jurgen Habermas and the Conditions of Rational
Discourse; rational society built on the foundation of
rationally liberated individuals speaking to one another
as equals toward the goal of agreement and thus action.
Contemporary Rhetoric III: Texts, Power,
and Alternatives
• Michel Foucault: Discourse, Knowledge, and
Power
• Jacques Derrida: Texts, Meanings, and
Deconstruction
• Richard Weaver: Rhetoric and the Preservation
of Culture
• Feminism and Rhetoric: Critique and Reform in
Rhetoric
• Queer theory
• George Kennedy and Comparative Rhetoric;
rhetoric in ancient China.
• Four teachers, out of 150, were attacked
by the students.
• Two percent of the teachers were attacked
by the students.
• Ninety-eight percent of the teachers were
not attacked by the students.
attacked
not
attacked
James Paul Gee. “Discourses: Reflections on M. A. K.
Halliday’s ‘Toward a Language-Based Theory of Learning’.”
“’If you look in the brain [of the finch] you see high sexual
dimorphism—A/B/C regions are robust in males and
atrophied or non-existent in females’.” (38)
“a very long history in Western culture in which women
have repeatedly been seen as ‘less developed’ or ‘less
evolved’ than men.” (38)
A
B
C
Academic writing is always value-laden
• Hyland, K. “Disciplinary Discourse” Writing: Texts,
Processes and Practices. Ed. C. N. Candlin and K.
Hyland. London: Longman, 2005.
studies on “how academic writers intervene in their texts
not only to present their findings, but also to evaluate
these findings, comment on them and build solidarity
with their readers” (124).