As I reflect on my past blogs, a common
theme stands out - why being aware of what "the Other" is affects
rhetoric. I think that this class has really pushed my definition of Other
and has shown me all the ways that rhetoric has been used, and is still used
today. I came into the class knowing the very basic rhetorical terms from high
school: ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos. I remember examining historical
speeches for rhetoric and that was about the extent of it. This semester has
demonstrated to me the importance of being able to look at other types of
rhetoric and to consider pushing past my typical area of study. In Roberta
Binkley’s essay “The Rhetoric of Origins and the Other: Reading the Ancient
Figure of Enheduanna” she describes how the Other in rhetoric could be “of
another period, place, culture, gender, and spiritual tradition” (47). I think
that this class showed me that anything outside of my primary discourse can be
considered Other, and my awareness of that can determine how I examine the rhetoric
of what is unfamiliar, or even reflect upon the rhetoric that I use with the
Other.
In my blog post about Queen
Lili’uokalani’s use of rhetoric, I think that I finally grasped a real purpose
of using rhetoric in a manipulative way. Her use of Kaona was intentional to
keep the Other (Non-Hawaiians) unaware of the actual meaning of the writing.
Again, awareness of who the Other was was key in her rhetoric.
This awareness of what you want the Other
to know and what you don’t affects rhetoric by determining what strategies you
include and possible things that you exclude. For example, Sarah Winnemucca
chose to write to a white audience in her autobiography, Living Among the
Paiutes, the first choice she made was to write this book in English – thereby making
it accessible to read by Euro-Americans. She used strategies such as pathos to
appeal to a typically female audience that she had gained throughout her fame
as an “Indian Princess” speaker during the late 1800s. Winnemucca was very
aware of her target audience and so her rhetorical strategies were catered to
them.
The blogs aided in narrowing down my
thoughts when I was reading, and looking over my favorite blogs I tended to
focus on the role of the other and the role of the writer in response to the
other. This space to write about anything related to the reading allowed me to
have the opportunity to find an interest and pursue it through multiple texts,
and looking back at those I wish that I had pursued that topic with every blog
I wrote, but overall I enjoyed the experience.
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ReplyDeleteI would agree with you that the notion of the “Other” was something that stuck out throughout this course. The other, to me, was this foreign subject within rhetoric. It took at least a couple of others. It encompassed a different ethnic background from that of the rhetorical analyzer. There were several notions that relate to this description, as ethnic origin, gender, or class could designate an ‘other’. It was someone other than a westerner who practiced different rhetoric from the traditional western rhetoric.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting how we all saw these different rhetorical backgrounds and how it varied from one another in terms of Otherness. To give an example of an other that was different from the ancient near-east Other, I found the American Indian rhetorics to pose themselves as rhetorics that were of an Other. Since it rhetors did not share our race, (sometimes gender), and social make up (or rhetorical conventions), it was designated with this Otherness. It is as though westerners have established the ‘traditional’ form of rhetoric; we have used that as a benchmark for which we compare the rhetorical conventions of the other. When it comes to this aspect, I like how you used Queen Lili’oukalani as an example. She, and her people, were analyzed as a rhetorical Other by us, the rhetorical analysts and she was categorized as a socio-ethnic other by her opponents. But what is so fascinating about her situation was that she had to break down that barrier of Otherness in order for her rhetoric to reach out to the Westerner, who already viewed her as a social Other. She had to suspend herself as an Other and write to the Western audience as a westerner of their own.
Another thing to note about this is that the Social other and the rhetorical Other were both given the same constraints and parameters. It was something/someone that had opposing cultural attributes and rhetorical ones. Both others were also analyzed as a minority ethnic group. I make this point because I observed that most rhetorical scholars who analyzed the foreign rhetorics (especially near-east, Chinese, and Egyptian rhetorics) they all had to define and redefine rhetoric and make it a referent. They defined rhetoric under Western principals and compared it to the analyzed rhetoric. For example, Hallo in The Birth of Rhetoric had to bring in the definition of rhetoric repeatedly to reestablish what rhetoric and to give full descriptions of what the rhetoric was and how it predated and differed from the traditional notion of rhetoric.
Now, I know that I was a little insistent on removing persuasion from the universal definition of rhetoric, but this notion of the Other proves to be a good reason why I wanted to do so. I found the universal definition of rhetoric to be too ethnocentric for our analysis of other styles of rhetoric. The other forms of rhetoric (especially Egyptian and Chinese rhetoric) did more than suit the purpose of persuasion. The Other used rhetoric differently from the westerner, and so we almost designated the other’s rhetoric as something different from the normalized form of rhetoric. For example, Chinese rhetoric was analyzed with this assumption of rhetoric as an essential mindset. But it was more geared towards intellectual autonomy, which is sort of the opposite from the persuasive aspect of rhetoric. Confucious’s notion of silence, for instance, did contend with the art of persuasion, and we designated the rhetoric as Other rhetoric.
In summary, your topic of the Other was something interesting and something that I contemplated a lot throughout the semester.