Rhetorical Listening in Action

Kyle Jensen, Krista Ratcliffe

Description

RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION: A CONCEPT-TACTIC APPROACH aims to cultivate writers who can listen across differences in preparation for thinking critically, communicating, and acting across those differences. Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen offer a rhetorical education centered on rhetorical listening as it inflects other rhetorical concepts, such as agency, rhetorical situation, identification, myth, and rhetorical devices.
RHETORICAL LISTENING IN ACTION spans classical and contemporary rhetoric, reading key concepts through rhetorical listening and supported by scholarship in rhetoric and composition, feminist studies, critical race studies, and intersectionality theory. The book expands on how we think about and negotiate difference and the factors that mediate social relations and competing cultural logics. Along the way, Ratcliffe and Jensen associate creative and heuristic tactics with clearly defined concepts to give all writers methods for listening rhetorically to and understanding alternative viewpoints.
For writers new to the concepts of rhetorical listening, four appendices show how these concepts illuminate rhetoric, language, discourse, argument, writing processes, research, and style.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 06 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781643173269
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms
Series Editors: Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan
The series promotes and amplifies the interdisciplinarity of rhetorics and feminisms, connecting rhetorical inquiry with contemporary academic, sociopolitical, and economic concerns. Books in the series explore such enduring questions of rhetoric’s rich and complex histories (globally and locally) as well as rhetoric’s relevance to current public exigencies of social justice, power, opportunity, inclusion, equity, and diversity. This attention to interdisciplinarity has already transformed the rhetorical tradition as we have known it (upper-class, public, powerful, mostly political, antagonistic, and delivered by men) into regendered, inclusionary rhetorics (democratic, deliberative, diverse, collaborative, private, intersectional, and delivered by all people). Our cultural, political, and intellectual advancements will be enriched by exploring the varied ways rhetorics and feminisms intersect and animate one another (and take us in new political, cultural, scientific, communicative, and pedagogical directions).
Books in the Series
A Rhetoric of Becoming: USAmerican Women in Qatar by Nancy Small (2022)
Rhetorical Listening in Action: A Concept-Tactic Approach by Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen (2022)


Rhetorical Listening in Action
A Concept-Tactic Approach
Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2022 by Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
1 2 3 4 5
978-1-64317-323-8 (paperback)
978-1-64317-324-5 (hardcover)
978-1-64317-325-2 (PDF)
978-1-64317-326-9 (EPUB)
Cover design by Kyle Jensen.
Cover image by Orfeas Green on Unsplash. Used by permission.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper and ebook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why a Rhetorical Listening Education?
1 Rhetorical Listening
2 Agency
3 Rhetorical Situation
4 Identification
5 Myth
6 Rhetorical Devices
Appendix A: Rhetoric, Language, Discourse, Argument
Appendix B: Writing Processes
Appendix C: Research
Appendix D: Style
Notes
Works Cited
Index to the Print Edition
About the Authors


To our daughters …
Zadie, Lia, Gwendolyn Jensen and Olivia Ratcliffe Brown


Acknowledgments
W e would like to thank all the people who helped us write this book: the students in our classes who tested and honed the concepts and tactics, the administrators who invited us to give professional development talks, the teachers who expressed interest in teaching rhetorical listening, the organizers and members of the 2019 RSA Summer Institute at the University of Maryland who attended our “Designing and Delivering Rhetorical Education” seminar, the reviewers and series editors who improved our thinking, the colleagues and friends whose work inspired us, and our families who always supported us.


Introduction: Why a Rhetorical Listening Education?
H ave you ever found it difficult to listen to someone with whom you disagree? For example, have you ever changed the TV channel while someone was speaking, closed a website to avoid reading what someone had written, kept your mouth shut at work or school so as not to make a scene, or decided not to visit a friend or family member just so you didn’t have to discuss that one topic that triggers you both? While avoiding such conflicts may work in some instances, in many others, people who disagree must live together in communities, workplaces, and homes. To navigate such situations, people who disagree need to find ways to listen to each other, especially given that current US educational systems generally provide lessons in only three of the four classical rhetorical arts: reading, writing, and speaking . . . but not listening.
The above difficult-to-listen-to situations are examples of rhetorical problems. Though you may not be accustomed to thinking about such situations as rhetorical problems, that is exactly what they are. Rhetorical problems may be defined in two ways: first, as situations in which speakers/writers must express their ideas, feelings, values, and beliefs in ways that their audiences can actually hear them, especially across differences; and second, as situations in which listeners/audiences must open themselves to actually hear ideas, feelings, values, and beliefs, even those with which they disagree. In such cases, the people involved must navigate, through language , all the contextual factors surrounding a rhetorical problem.
Rhetorical problems are tricky to navigate because ideas, feelings, values, and beliefs always connect a personal opinion with a broader cultural discourse, which is simply a set of common words, claims, and ways of reasoning echoed among a group of people who may or may not know each other. For example, suppose someone claims that wearing a mask is a personal choice that affects only the wearer. Realistically, that “someone” is not the only person who has ever made this claim; indeed, that personal opinion echoes a chorus of other people’s similar claims, all of which create a discourse about not wearing masks that is situated in a particular time and place, the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Conversely, “someone’s” personal opinion may also encounter another person’s competing opinion, which is also linked to a larger cultural discourse, such as one claiming that wearing a mask affects many people by preventing the spread of disease. Within this context of competing opinions, “someone’s” personal opinion about wearing a mask is suddenly implicated not just in “someone’s” own thinking and not just in the discourses of those who agree but also in a cultural conflict. And with such a conflict, rhetorical problems ensue.
Rhetorical problems have haunted humans throughout recorded history (and no doubt before). At best, people seek to understand those who think and act differently, as when different countries create alliances, when competing political parties value compromise, when workplaces or schools champion diversity in teamwork, and when family or friends attempt to bridge their differences. But at worst, people enact violence against those who think and act differently, as when different countries go to war, 2 when political leaders deny basic human rights to women and under-represented groups, when workplaces or schools refuse to recognize or engage people’s differences, and when friends and family throw abusive language, or punches, at one another.
Just as rhetorical problems have haunted human history, so too have attempts to resolve them, and these attempts are both structural and personal. To effect resolutions via structural change, societies have created cultural structures, such as Athenian democracy in fifth-century BCE Greece or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995 South Africa. To effect such resolutions via personal efforts, individuals have forwarded arguments for the collective good, an example being arguments promoting the education of women from Ban Zhao’s writings in first-century CE China to Mary Wollstonecraft’s versions in eighteenth-century England. If people are to live together as peacefully as possible and to afford everyone the best opportunities possible, then they must learn ways to recognize, analyze, and engage rhetorical problems. One way, this book argues, is by learning to listen rhetorically.
While Rhetorical Listening in Action will not solve all the world’s problems, it does offer a rhetorical education grounded in rhetorical listening that cultivates writers who can listen across differences in preparation for communicating and acting within and across those differences. To articulate the need for this education, this “Introduction” makes the following moves: 1) identifies and analyzes one cultural conflict (the 2020 US Presidential election) to exemplify how rhetorical problems function; 2) argues what rhetorical listening offers rhetorical education; 3) explains a concept-tactic approach to this education; 4) defines a rhetorical listening mindset, which writers may adopt as they study concepts and tactics in subsequent chapters and engage various writing tasks in their everyday lives; and 5) describes what to expect from subsequent chapters.
What Does a Cultural Conflict Tell Us about Rhetoric Problems?
The 2020 US Presidential election generated many rhetorical problems. Families and friends stopped talking to one another as everything became politicized (again, wearing masks comes to mind). As such, the election exposed the need for a rhetorical education that cultivates writers who can listen across differences. During this election period, people disagreed not just about what roles government should serve and who should be elected but also about how to grant women respect and equality (arguments about #MeToo), how to achieve racial justice (arguments about #BlackLivesMatter), and how to end a pandemic (arguments about masks, social distancing, and vaccines). Immediately after the November election, the nation was further divided by arguments about alleged voter fraud despite the judicial system’s finding