#Rhetorical Analysis

[rezakiofficial]

Mann I love this game so much im writing one of my essays on it. 💀💀

[thatsoheeron]

This is not very Christmassy and maybe a longshot but I've been very fortunate to have many kind and intelligent peoople as friends on here, does anyone have any resources on how to analyze argumentative statements? Specifically political/social/ideological ones. More specifically fascist arguments of the American (Trumpism) variety.

I'm thinking of making a segment where I highlight and break down rhetoric I come across online, and essentially teach the building blocks of critical thinking/analysis and making it free for the public.

If anyone has any resources on how to teach these tools or any advice on which direction I can head in that would be greatly appreciated!

Also happy holidays everyone!

[beelzebubsbois]

You ever find a post so weird you want to do a rhetorical Analysis of it??

[khalidistan]

I'm being mildly facetious but I also just have been thinking abt this so I'm gonna ramble, this is also gonna mostly be abt drake's verse bc (stares at a wall)

who told you badman don't dance? / who told you gangsters don't dance? even with a weap on my hip, I dance

this lyric is saying how men who are typically viewed as "tough" are still able to indulge in lightness and joy. when hus says "even with a weap on my hip, I dance" he's contrasting the image of the violent, fighting man with the levity of dancing

touch my forehead, chest, left shoulder, then right side / praying my brothers are good outside / I know the vibes, I know the vibes

aside from the fact that drake is jewish and will more often than not don islamic aesthetics (affectionate. literally he should do it more. I want him to say wallahi on the next album) yet is doing the holy cross prayer (? what is the term for this), this part could (in my analogy) relate to praying your comrades are still safe through the revolutionary struggle

you're the one, girl, stop rolling eyes / I find love and it slowly dies

this is like. I really like songs that have this sharp lyrical contrast between love/pursuit/romance and the internal/existential dread, anik does this a lot in his music too. like through all the pain they're still trying to find love and flirt and impress but this little voice in the back of their minds says "I find love and it slowly dies" this also relates to the fact that during armed struggle your lover could literally die. like killed by the colonizer.

trouble is there, trouble is there / trouble been right there, trouble is there / trouble gon' find me anywhere, trouble gon' find me, bubble and wine-y

this part is so resigned, like accepting one's circumstances (see next pull-quote too) and yet drake switches it with "yeah anyways, bubble and winey" I could connect this to constant/hyper-surveillance, deliberate targeting by the state, or just plain bad luck no matter what you do to resist it, but also this is an afrobeats song with drake

they want me dead, but, don't remind me / both hands around you, it's not tiny

we've gone from accepting one's suboptimal/grim circumstances to accepting one's mortality, potentially premature mortality. and yet he pushes it to the back of his brain to focus on the present and his lover. like is that not revolutionary or what (my internet disconnects

if you read to the end of this post I am so sorry for subjecting you to my psychic damage. hope you enjoyed. this is what happens when you let leftists listen to drake

[millimatter]

Ok I’m an English major, right?

Can someone PLEASE explain to my why I just now as a 20 year old was told the difference between critical and rhetorical analysis. I feel like this is something I should have learned in high school.

Critical- going purely off of the text

Rhetorical- not only the text but also knowing about the author’s life, historical context, who the intended audience was, and how I as someone in 2023 have biases for or against the text.

BUT, not only that, I have never written or actively used critical analysis in the classroom before. It has only ever been rhetorical analysis in the sense that my teachers will bring in outside information along with the text for us students to use in our essays and broader discussions.

I would even argue that I’ve never used critical analysis other than when analyzing movies for fun because I’m simply too lazy to search out the broader contexts such as director’s intent, historical context, or maybe missed symbolism. Movies are the only analysis that I will purely go off of what’s shown to me.

And I feel like I’ve heard of critical reading SO much but never critical analysis. Idk it just felt like after todays lecture I’ve missed an important baby step that I missed in high school because of dual-credit courses.

[localfaecryptid]

Nothing About Us Without Us

I recently had to do a rhetorical analysis essay for my composition class and I chose Alison Kafer's amazing essay "Imagined Futures". I liked it so much that I decided to publish it to my Substack. The formatting had to be weird due to the assignment requirements so I might post a more polished version where those clunkier bits are taken out, but I also think it's a good template for how to write your first rhetorical essay if you want to dip your toes into the water.

[popcorn-plots]

I'm learning rhetorical analysis :)

Send me fics to rhetorically analyze so I can practiceee

[dapperpawn]

For fun and giggles, I went to this guy's Twitter so you don't have to (it's as weird as you might think—a lot of stuff about Machiavelli and Napoleon). Here's the whole image:

Look at how utterly incoherent these criteria are. "Directional changes: Sets off an upward spiral/Sets off a downward spiral." "Values: Hints at forgotten values/Mocks the concept of values." "Good GPS, Bad GPS: A good map/A malevolently bad map." This is vibes-based, an irony when compared to the claim that this is an "objective difference" between good and bad art.

I want to look at the rhetorical and ideological moves employed here. I don't know if this guy is a fascist, so I'm not saying that; I only want to look at how this particular tweet fits in to the broader context of fascist ideology and rhetoric (whether that's intentional or not, I don't really care enough about the guy to figure out).

I'm not an expert on art history or theory; it would be silly of me to try to explain these subjects and some of the major problems with fascist ideas about art when other people have already done such a better job of it than I could. If you haven't seen them, here are a couple of great videos on the topics of what counts as good art:

My commentary about the rhetorical moves of this guy's "masterlist" of differences between good and bad art below the cut:

Our intrepid tweetster gives the game away when he says "Instinct Knows". This is a foundational core of how fascist ideology works. You are not supposed to think, only react. These ideas about art relate to Umberto Eco's[1] characteristics 2–5 (bold mine, italics original):

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. 3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

In this guy's conception of art, you're supposed to react to art on an instinctual level. "Good" and "bad" art is defined as "art that makes you feel comfortable" and "art that makes you feel uncomfortable"—that is, good art is familiar, easy to understand, visually stable, aesthetically orthodox, and so on. Discomfort or confusion, which is often the point of a piece of art, is re-framed as an instinctual recognition of "objectively bad" art.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. 5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

Also consider Laurence W. Britt's[2] 11th characteristic of fascism:

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

A lot of art is a commentary of other art, or an intentional subversion or disregard for "rules" of what art can or should be. Fascism requires total submission to the ruling hegemony, so any form of criticism or opposition is a dangerous skill for people to have.

While we can see how the above characteristics relate to this attitude about art, rhetorically here's another move hidden in all this. From Umberto Eco again:

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Did you catch it? "The most annoying people in the world love to say [that] there is no objective difference between good art and bad art." And yet, nothing in this "Masterlist of 15 Differences" is, actually, objective. Every single category is subjective, the very choices of category are subjective, and the "good" and "bad" definitions of the categories are not only subjective in the sense of what definitions he went with, but also subjective in their interpretation (what counts, for example, as art that "boosts" vs. "saps" energy from the viewer? I'll bet that it depends a lot on the viewer, don't you think?).

None of the categories even deal with, you know, properties of art, such as composition, contrast, color, form, depictions, etc., which may be the only objective things that you can say about art*. The closest might be "essential nature" because "good" art (apparently) is "structured and rhythmic" while "bad" art is "unstructured and obsessively anti-rhythm", so there's a case that what he's (poorly) trying to describe is composition of a piece, but even here there's a subjective attitude: what counts, objectively, as being "obsessively anti-rhythm"? Do you have to know the artist's personal obsessions of intent, or is it a property of the work regardless of the artist's intent?

These are the wrong questions to ask, of course, because the whole point is that THIS IS ABOUT VIBES. You're not supposed to understand them; the vagueness and incoherence of the claims serve to make it hard to rebut them. You get lost in the weeds trying to layout a complex argument, while your interlocutor can just make claims based on intuition and unexamined bias that feel true. By claiming that these subjective, and indeed, explicitly instinctual, reactions to art are objective, objectivity is redefined as instinctual reaction.

Asserting that instinctual reactions to art are actually objective serves to limit our (if we accept these premises) ability to critically and complexly reason about art. In this form of argument, "objectivity" functions as a get-out-of-jail-for-free card, only in this case "jail" is "defending your positions". "This is bad because I don't like it" can be contested; "this is objectively bad" can't be because objectivity, in this view, can't be contested.**

To understand the entirety of this "masterlist" of differences between "good" and "bad" art, just look at difference 8: "Instinct Knows: Instinctively recognized as art/Instinctively recognized as a scam". That's his thesis; everything else is post-hoc justification.

* You can say objectively, for instance, that the color red is or isn't present in a painting - or at least, you can say objectively that the painting reflects light within a certain range of the visible spectrum. You can say that the painting does or does not contain a depiction of a centaur that closely resembles classical Greek depictions and descriptions of centaurs (although it may be subjective to say that the painting is about centaurs; maybe the centaur is really a metaphor for the relationship between a horse and a rider, so a centaur is depicted, but is not the subject of the painting). And so forth.

**This is a form of mote-and-bailey argument. If you try to argue that art is subjective, or you try to argue the particulars about the categories or definitions, your interlocutor can retreat to making you argue against objective reality; any time you contest what is or is not objective, or whether objectivity can be applied or appealed to in a given situation, or whether objectivity is even possible from within a subjective experience, they can claim that you're denying simple reality... Sort of like those "the transes(TM) don't want to accept simple biology" folks.

----

Eco, Umberto. "Ur-Fascism". The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995. nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism (or theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism)

Britt, Laurence W. "Fascism Anyone?". Free Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Spring 2003). secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone

Tag yourself as this list of “bad art” features, according to a twitter fascist

[teachanarchy]

Watch "Rhetorical Analysis and Transfer | Rhetoric & Composition | Study Hall" on YouTube

[howdoresourcesworkforus]

An analysis of BENEFITS.GOV's webpage titled "Find Resources to Improve your Living Conditions"

Link: https://www.benefits.gov/news/article/364

This is a website that outlines various resources that are available to people in poverty in the United States. Particularly, it discusses particular programs of government assistance that American citizens can sign up for and benefit from.

This website is functioning both as a guide and a repository that links out to other resources. It is clear and concise and mostly comes in the form of writing and links. There is a photo on the top of the article that shows a family who is supposed to be browsing the website I am assuming but the photo doesn’t include any information about the content of the website. It is a nice addition in order to add some level of personability to a website that is otherwise quite simple.

The audience for this website is American citizens that are in need of federal assistance and don’t know where to start. This guide provides links along with brief information about what each link will be able to provide a potential user. The site is very interactive and necessitates a sort of browsing by the user. 

There is no central author of the article itself since it is a government website. This means that it was presumably written by a group of people and vetted before being published publicly to represent the US government.

The site features relatively small text but the text is concise and purposeful. There are different sections of the site that are divided by what sort of information they provide. There are also lots of hyperlinks that provide easy access to the resources being mentioned in the article. This makes the article itself much more of a functional resource and makes it much more useful to users. The site is also tagged with keywords that make finding it easier while browsing for resources like these.

[thomasenglishclass]

(via ELECTION SEASON SPECIAL: a rhetorical analysis of Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s president-elect speeches – The Hyperbolit School)

[theweeklydiscourse]

I’m sick of people passing off patronizing and condescending commentary about how naive and impressionable women are as useful and educational. These people will base their analysis of fiction on sexist notions about how easily women are “tempted “ by malevolent villains and then act as if that’s some revolutionary take. They’ll unironically construe the narrative in a way that takes away all agency from the female heroine and frame her decisions as entirely the result of the villain’s manipulation.

They wring their hands about how dangerous it is for women to be exposed to these stories and moan about how terrible it is that hot villains appeal to the “baser instincts” and tempt female viewers further (Yes, I actually saw someone make this argument) It’s truly bizarre to see people agreeing with such patronizingly sexist rhetoric and saying things like “I miss the days when villain romances were cautionary tales and not encouraged.” As if women thirsting after attractive fictional villains is some epidemic that threatens society.

It’s especially irritating when women are the ones saying these things. They want to believe that they are a rare exception that, unlike those other brainless girls, can understand that liking hot villains will threaten their morals and lead them astray…OH THE HORROR!! Please save your dramatic preaching for the next purity conference and stop pretending that your sanctimonious commentary has any substance whatsoever.

[rainbow-sunshine-unicorn]

No but you don’t understand how much I love that Anthony doesn’t see pleasuring Kate as a means to an end, but rather a complete purpose in and of itself

Anthony is someone who eats his wife out because he derives his pleasure from the act, and not because he sees it as a precursor to penetration.

I love how Anthony centres Kate’s pleasure from the very first time. In the gazebo scene, he keeps his pants on the entire time. In season 3 ep 1, he has his pants off and he’s still focused on eating her out. In ep 5, his idea of a quickie is eating her out. He enjoys making her feel good and that’s his entire purpose

It’s not just that the focus is on a woman’s pleasure but also that there is such a refreshing lack of emphasis on penetration as the whole sole end goal, especially in the context of a heterosexual couple. It’s so beautiful and important. To me, that is the embodiment of the female gaze.

[sonofarathorn]

If I see any of yall praising Trump for “bringing back tiktok”— and yes I’m using the strongest air quotes— I’m gonna smack you. He literally orchestrated all of this. Please use your brain.

[jomtones-bussy]

People on tiktok infantilizing curly from mouthwashing and saying that him becoming crippled was his punishment. Killing u. With my teeth.

[idontmindifuforgetme]

Reading an article on how no one truly knows how to read a book front to back anymore is making me so terrified I literally don’t gaf if I’m a biochem major it’s looking more and more every day like I’m going for that literature master’s degree for no reason other than to feel something