Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents
This article of reading was just as boring as the last one to me. It was a long drawn out piece detailing how rhetoric interacts with its environment and explains with gross definition the details of how that occurs. The first part explains how the exigence effects the discourse of the rhetor. It compares the discourse and the exigence of the civil war to the political issues of now and then. Later on it gives a short explanation of how rhetors have to be able to change to the audience on a whim, as that is a trait of a good rhetor. Lastly the article outlines the constraints of rhetoric, it defines it with four words; “persons, events, objects, and relations”. The constraints are all based around how effectively the rhetor can relate his audience to his or her particular environment.
I thought the first part of the article was pretty obvious and didn’t need much of an explanation. By definition Exigence needs to motivate the discourse. Why does it need any further detail? You can’t have one without the other, it’s like CatDog or Tom and Jerry. The book goes into the subject further yet and describes the parameters of discourse and relates the historical context of the civil war to discourse. The article says that a commanders ability to react to a battlefield is like a rhetors ability to use the exigence of his discourse on an audience. I think that a battlefield commander usually has a bit more of a stressful job than a rhetor but, hey, to each his own.
The important part to remember if you ask me would be the constraints of rhetorical situations. This will help give an outline to a possible rhetor what he or she may be dealing with when creating a speech or form of writing for a specific venue. I would use the example that and advertisement for farm equipment may be a hot seller up in North Dakota, where every citizen of that state can instantly relate to the topic of the ad, but the same advertisement in Nevada may get no attention at all because it’s hard to farm in a desert. That is how constraints would help in real life situations and knowing them may be important down the road.
mattcgotta 