Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [45]
Here is another example, a rhetorical analysis of a commencement address delivered by novelist David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 (later published as “This Is Water”). Notice how the writer isolates parts of the speech, such as its apologies and denials, in order to arrive at claims about the rhetoric of the speech as a whole. (See Chapter 1, the short take called Rhetoric: What It Is and Why You Need It.) The writer begins by listing four quotations from the address.
“I am not the wise old fish” (1).
“Please don’t worry that I am getting ready to lecture you about compassion” (2)
“Please don’t think that I am giving you moral advice” (5).
“Please don’t dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon” (7)
A recurrent feature of the address is the author’s imploring his audience (“Please”) not to assume that he is offering moral instruction. The sheer repetition of this pattern suggests that he is worried about sounding like a sermonizer, that the writer is anxious about the didacticism of his speech.
But obviously the piece does advance a moral position; it does want us to think about something serious, which is part of its function as a commencement address. What’s most interesting is the final apology, offered just as the piece ends (7). Here Wallace appears to shift ground. Rather than denying that he’s “the wise old fish” (1), he denies that he is Dr. Laura, or rather, he pleads not to be dismissed as a Dr. Laura. So he’s saying, in effect, that we should not see him as a TV personality who scolds (“finger wagging”) and offers moral lessons for daily life (“sermon”).
Why is he so worried about the didactic function? Obviously, he is thinking of his audience, fearful of appearing to be superior, and fearful that his audience does not want to be preached at. But he cannot resist the didactic impulse the occasion bestows. In these terms, what is interesting is the divided nature of the address: on the one hand, full of parables—little stories with moral intent—and on the other hand, full of repeated denials of the very moral impulse his narratives and the occasion itself generically decree.
In our next example, Michelle Bielko, a history and English major, isolates details in the writing of 19th-century poet Walt Whitman to theorize his celebratory treatment of the Civil War.
Of interest is the fact that an analysis of Whitman’s poems and journalistic works from the period suggest that for the artist the Civil War was in some way a continuation of the noble Revolutionary War, providing Americans with the opportunity to exhibit heroism in the likeness of the fathers of the nation. A close examination of the language Whitman used in his Civil War poetry anthology Drum Taps and in Memoranda During the War demonstrates that the poet consciously sought ways to cast President Lincoln as the George Washington of the Civil War, both northerners and southerners as the virtuous patriots of the Civil War, and to curiously leave the loathsome loyalist of the American Revolution without a corresponding double in his literary representation of the 1861–1865 conflict. In doing so, Whitman was ironically able to reinvent the so called “Secession War,” which threatened to divide and destroy the United States, as a unifying conflict as worthy of celebration as the American War for Independence from Britain.
Two parallel features drive this writer’s analysis of Whitman: that he treats both northerners and southerners as Civil War patriots and that he focuses only on patriots in the Revolutionary War, ignoring colonists who remained loyal to the crown.
We take our final example from a classic early text in Urban Studies, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), by Jane Jacobs. Notice how she weaves a pattern of descriptive detail to build her implicit argument that sidewalks in cities are sites where people police themselves, providing safety