Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [91]
Bring the tools for reading analytically to bear on this passage in the following sequence:
a. Use paraphrase to restate both Boorstin’s claims and Rosen’s exposition of it.
b. Then locate the dominant binaries in the paragraph and articulate these to help you determine what is at stake there.
c. Once you’ve done these tasks, take Boorstin’s theory and use it as a lens to examine the presentation of a public figure of your choice, whether a politician, a contemporary hero, a celebrity, a musician, a sports star, and so forth. As you write about this figure, seek to explore not only how your subject fits the lens but also how he or she does not fit. Use the Whiston essay on talk shows as a model for negotiating complication in both the lens and the primary material.
3. Apply the Lens of Ritual to Daily Life. In her book, The Rituals of Dinner (1991), Margaret Visser discusses table manners as a form of ritual:
Rules of politeness tend to cluster round moments of transition, of meeting others, making decisions, conferring, parting, commemorating. Rituals are there to make difficult passages easier. They include the gestures—waving, nodding, smiling, speaking set phrases—which daily smooth our meetings with other people; the attitudes and postures we adopt when standing or sitting in the presence of others, especially when we are talking to them; the muttering of ‘excuse me’ when interrupting others or squeezing past them. Full-dress celebrations of coming together, of marking transitions and recollections, almost always require food, with all the ritual politeness implied in dining—the proof that we all know how eating should be managed. We eat whenever life becomes dramatic: at weddings, birthdays, funerals, at parting and at welcoming home, or at any moment which a group decides is worthy of remark. Festivals and feasts are solemn or holy days; they are so regularly celebrated by people meeting for meals that ‘having a feast’ has actually come to mean ‘eating a lot.’
As this paragraph suggests, rituals depend on rules and conventional behaviors that provide order and stability, thereby easing “difficult passages.” Use the tools you’ve acquired in this and previous chapters to uncover the implications in this paragraph. Then use it as a lens to analyze some ritual from everyday life. Obviously, Visser is concentrating on the ritual functions surrounding food—which you can use as a model for your investigation of some other ritual, perhaps one that you never noticed as a ritual before. It could be any system regulated by manners:
handling a pet in public,
ordering drinks for a group of friends,
visiting a professor during office hours,
participating in class discussion,
attending a baseball game, or
socializing in the library.
And the list is endless. Choose any ritual activity, and use Visser as a model and a lens to analyze it. Describe carefully its rules, and explore what these rules control and why such control is useful.
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Chapter 6
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Making Interpretations Plausible
IN THIS CHAPTER, we focus on the move from description to interpretation and address some of the issues that interpretation typically raises. What makes some interpretations better than others? What makes interpretations more than a matter of personal opinion?
The book has so far offered two kinds of prompts for making interpretive leaps: ranking (what is most important, or interesting, or revealing and why?) and asking “So what?” We’ve also demonstrated that the writer who can offer careful description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share.