answered: Unit 1: Kairos & the American Mind Language Acts to Lay Clai

  

Unit 1: Kairos & the American Mind
Language Acts to Lay Claim to Human Rights & Dignity
Defining America and what it means to be American has been an ongoing rhetorical endeavor, itself situated within larger discourses about governments’ obligations to secure liberty and protect human rights and dignity. Diverse rhetors have advanced arguments responding to historical-cultural exigencies of their times to advance civic arguments, rhetorical texts that define and lay claim to human rights.
In this unit, you’ll read three influential texts by individuals acting on behalf of many, invoking principles of human rights commonly held to be “American” to warrant assertive claims to their rights and compelling calls to protect human dignity. We’ll read these texts as conscientious acts to “express the American mind,” (as Thomas Jefferson described his intention for the Declaration of Independence). These rhetors faced the challenge of both disrupting and appealing to audiences’ existing assumptions and values to shift the application of those values to actions recognizing and protecting the rights and human dignities of all Americans.
Key concepts & Texts: Rhetorical Situation & Kairos:
In unit 1, we will analyze texts from three genres: a speech, a book chapter, and a lecture. As civic discourses, all are public in nature and intended for multiple audiences and purposes. Carrie Chapman Catt, Luther Standing Bear, and Elie Wiesel advance their arguments with deep consciousness of audience, exigence, and the constraints and affordances of their situations—in other words, with close attention to their rhetorical situation. Like any skilled rhetor, they do so with complex and specific purposes and aims in mind. The modern conception of rhetorical situation breaks down the ancient, holistic notion of kairos, or fitness to the occasion, into smaller components for analysis. While these rhetors read and respond to elements of the rhetorical situation afforded to them by chance, they also explicitly construct their respective situations to create audiences and conditions favorable to their persuasive aims. In short, these rhetors both respond to kairos and deliberately shape kairos. Longaker and Walker argue that “[t]he rhetorical perspective views discourse – any meaningful use of signs or symbols (words, images, etc.) – as always and inherently situated” (7). Any rhetorical analysis then, must begin with a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical situation.
Purposes for paper 1:
Your task is to engage in close analysis of the nuances of rhetorical situation (kairos) that called forth and shaped one of these texts. The overarching purpose for doing so is to explore and reveal deeper and more complex understanding of the text and its rhetorical dimensions than you began with. Ultimately, this kind of analytical thinking can be applied to any discourse, but your aims for this assignment are to explore, discover, and reveal rhetorical features that illuminate the text’s effectiveness as a historical act of language. In doing so, you are not just dissecting a document generated in and relevant only to a long-past kairotic moment, but one that, upon close analysis, lends insight into our own kairos—to help us “to judge more justly, to speak more effectively, to behave more responsibly” on issues with present exigence (Longaker and Walker 4).
The Problem: (Worth 125 points) Carrie Chapman Catt’s Speech, Luther Standing Bear’s chapter, and Wiesel’s lecture are “exemplary case[s] of…skilled rhetor[s] working with the possibilities that the initial, given kairos makes available, and seizing the opportunities of the new, created kairos that [they] develop” as their texts progress (Longaker and Walker 27). Your assignment: choose one of these three texts as the subject for your analysis, in which you will explore how the rhetor presents an effective argument for the intended audience by responding to various aspects of kairos and how the rhetor creates kairos via the text itself. You will determine and isolate the kairotic elements and rhetorical choices that you’ll explore. Your essay should provide insight into how these elements function together to effect the rhetor’s intended audiences, exigencies, and purposes. In order to accomplish this, you will need to do the following:
1. Craft an introduction to orient readers to the text under analysis and the analytical purposes described above and leads logically to a thesis that forecasts the specific direction of your analysis.
2. In the initial body paragraphs, lay the groundwork for the analysis by providing an accurate description of the rhetor’s rhetorical situation, to include a brief summary of the argument itself.
3. Use the remaining body paragrapsh (the bulk of your paper) to engage in deep analysis to support your thesis. Since your thesis will advance a claim about how the rhetor responds to and shapes kairos in order to be persuasive, you should use body paragraphs to put forth smaller claims about the particulars, provide textual evidence, and follow with analysis of how the evidence works as you claim. Such analysis should lead you to small insights about each passage you analyze, which will function well as paragraph conclusions.
4. Conclude your paper with a synthesis of these insights, in which you add them up to a larger insight about the rhetor’s rhetorical choices. Your inferences should recast your thesis statement in light of insights gained from the analysis.
Requirements:
1) Your paper must be 5 pages long, not including your works cited page.
2) When analyzing the rhetorical situation and kairos, rely on and demonstrate understanding of the explanations of these concepts as presented in Chapter 2 of Rhetorical Analysis and in class discussions. You may also use concepts presented in chapters 1 and 3 to support your analysis.
3) Provide evidence from the text you’re analyzing to support your claims. You may quote minimally from one credible, outside source if needed to help you articulate the historical context of the speech. Cite all sources in text and in a works cited page. Quotations should not extend more than 4 lines of text for this paper.
4) Focus your analysis on how the text addresses its primary (intended) situation, either oralaural, or textual rhetorical situation. This means that you will not have to analyze the actual audience.
5) Adhere to MLA style (8th Ed) for all formatting, citation, and documentation. Use in-text citations within the body of your paper whenever incorporating quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material. You must prepare a Works Cited page to document all entries.
6) Give your paper an original and relevant title.
Audience:
You should imagine me and your peers in this class as readers within the discipline of college rhetoric and composition. Thus, you should read and write with the aims and expectations of rhetoricians in mind: to complicate your understanding of texts, and not to judge (for now). All essays in this class should be thoughtfully revised, carefully edited, and perfectly cited and formatted in MLA style so that readers can move smoothly through your ideas and focus on understanding and responding to those ideas.
Genre:
Formal academic essay; specifically, a rhetorical analysis. A rhetorical analysis is grounded in accurate recollection and brief summary of what was said and what was meant, but the purpose of this genre is to employ specific analytical lenses to observe, dissect, and explore the rhetorical features of the text so that you and your readers will better understand its function in its context. It is analytical in nature, discussing not what the text says or whether or how well it works in your opinion, but how the text functions in its rhetorical context and implications of the writer’s rhetorical choices.
Support:
-Refer to Mountain Lion Writer, chapters 1 – 4 and Ross’ “What is Academic Writing?” (esp. description of semi-open writing assignment).
-Seek feedback from Instructor
-Seek feedback from The Writing Center and classmates.