The texts that Fahnestock/Secor and Killingsworth/Palmer both present are interesting because they focus on not only the creation of audience through discourse, but how that audience finds value in the aforementioned discourse. To them, the value of different examples of rhetoric can be deciphered through a close analysis of the audience, which is a collective whole and does not appear to reflect any qualities of Grant-Davie’s “multi-modal audience” or the unintentional audience.
Fahnestock and Secor begin by explaining how classical stases can be applied to modern subjects. Stases are important in composing because they not only provide a system of invention and a principle for arrangement, but they also search for the analysis of audience and context. For the most part, topics of value are usually expressed using a certain stases, or compound of stases. The stases they specify are questions of fact, definition, cause, value and procedure (and sometimes questions of policy). These stases are closely related to Grant-Davie’s term exigence, in that they both function in a similar way- that is, exploring the need of the discourse. However, I believe they are not one in the same. I say this because exigence creates a rhetorical situation which calls forth the discourse, while stases have a multitude of uses, one of which is recognizing the need of the audience. Fahnestock and Secor both seem to believe that the audience is appealed to, and created by, the use and disuse of different stases.
Before Fahnestock and Secor explore stases in the scientific and literary genre, they clarify that the stases also operate as a set of assumptions about the reactions of the audience. They give them example of a text which proposes action with the highest stases of value, but an argument using a lower stases might also move an audience to action. It in within that example that they explore the possibilities of ‘writing within a genre,’ explaining that the conventions of each different genre are not concrete, but defined by what the audience desires or expects. They then work to explore the stases in two different genres, one of science and one of literary analysis. When studying scientific articles, they writers often stay in one (lower) stasis, which is used to construct an audience. “Scholars usually focus on well-defined issues for limited audiences” (430). In the literary genre, the authors use the higher stases to debate the relative value of the work they are analyzing, assuming that the audience already knows general definitions and value. It is interesting to note that while the value of the literary genre is explicitly stated, the value of the scientific genre exists within itself. This idea, that the scientific genre is inherently deconstructed and its value cannot be left ineffable, is echoed in the work of Killingsworth and Palmer as well.
Killingsworth and Palmer assumed the task of analyzing the same topic using different genres/frameworks. They first distinguish between what is ‘news’ and what is ‘human interest’, defining human interest as ‘journalistic science that has a social value’; human interest pieces say that science must be connected to something larger in order to hold any value. They study a magazine known for an extensive use of human interest stories, Time, when it began focusing on the topic of global warming. The articles featuring this topic enhanced the drama of the situation, connecting the effects of global warming direct to human activities such as the economy and health concerns. Before long, this ‘popular image’ of science gained a sensationalist aspect, reaching a large audience. This use of applied science served its purpose- to make a previously scientific piece of discourse available and applicable to the life of the regular human being. But within it are questions of depth and sincerity- as well as questions of whether or not this treatment of scientific discourse can fully function as an environmentalist movement.
When we look at the global warming topic in the scientific genre, we are able to notice many distinct differences. For one, the Science articles focus of the research rather than the names and personalities of those people involved. They also work off of a format which ignores the win/lose aspect and lacks a defined beginning, middle and end. Killingsworth and Palmers focuses for a moment on the use of Bazerman’s intertext, which is inherent in nearly any scientific discourse. All in all, the scientific discourse on global warming lacks almost any entertainment value. In fact, K/P states that the value is found within the information itself, that the expected audience does not need the information to be attached to any other applied sciences in order to be valuable. The dissonance between these two genres can be found when noticing that the Time article makes the audience feel distant from the scientists, using verbiage such as “scientists estimate,” while the scientific article works to make the general public, so that the reader assumes an indentify with the scientific community (and solidifying it’s scientific objectivism).
Scientific genres and topics are difficult to appeal to the general public. In both articles, the audience is stagnant and unchanging. They assume one position and retain it, and are either appealed to or ignore by the use of stases and the concept of human interest. In contrast, the rhetor seems to serve a multitude of purposes at once, from informer to policy maker to critic. Killingsworth and Palmer look to see how information is generated depending on the journalist’s understanding of value and how it is portrayed to the audience, which Fahnestock and Secor look deeply into how the audience’s understanding of value controls how the discourse is created. When combined, we can see the effects of these different understanding of value, as well as how they either can work for, or against, science.
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