Flower and Hayes’ article on “discovery” has taught me more than I believed it could. As a student of writing, I suppose I have become defeated or at the very least complacent about my knowledge of the art of writing. My belief was that some people had it within themselves to be phenomenal writers, and others did not, and I thought I was one of those who did not. Now, perhaps this is still true, but I was delighted to learn that the creative process is not a spontaneous product of the writer’s mind, but a collage of several influences brought to life by a writer’s imagination. Writing does not flow from one place, it flows from several places, and is brought together and refined through the writer’s pen. Writing is not so much discovery from within as it is creation from the inside out. I am humbled by the creative process now more than ever before. For the everyday writing assignments, I will work on creating “stored problem representations,” simple formats stored in the brain to save time and energy when dealing in the familiar. As for the unfamiliar, I look forward to discovering my own process of discovery.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Teaching Writing Written Response #2
Jean Piaget’s study of human adaptation causes me to think about my adaptation to life at VMI. I am sure that I am not the only student in this class writing about this. It is quite easy to relate to Piaget’s concepts of “assimilation,” “accommodation,” and “schemes.” Being in an environment such as VMI’s certainly brings the word assimilation to mind. We are forced to learn about our new environment rather quickly here, that we may thrive in it. This of course goes hand in hand with “accommodation,” in which we subconsciously form new habits as we work and live in our environment. The idea of “schemes” is also all to familiar to cadets. Our lives here are made up of schemes. The amount of rituals we go through on a daily basis here is actually kind of absurd when you think about it. Over time our schemes change. We begin to not worry about the same things we did as rats, and things that were not important before become important, and vice versa. One can see how VMI or the military in general is a good example of Piaget’s adaptation concepts.
Teaching Writing-Written Response #1
While the textbook, “A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers,” naturally showcases the importance of the art of rhetoric, it appears that not everyone agrees with the idea that rhetoric is, ultimately, a good thing. I am puzzled by the controversy that this subject has caused. Because there are so many different definitions and views of rhetoric, I am not sure if there ever could be a definitive way to identify the subject. On one side, scholars view rhetoric as a tool for the slimy and the corrupt to influence the ignorant masses, and on another side, rhetoric is a tool for learning and teaching the ignorant. Of course, a third side believes that rhetoric is both these things, it is just how one uses it. To this third side, rhetoric is a tool with no agenda, ill will, or noble purpose of its own. Like a hammer or a scalpel, it could be used for good or bad, or neither. Before rhetoric I have never encountered a subject so fraught with controversy since learning about evolution.
“The Rest Cure”
John Armellino
ERH 203W 02
Major Knepper
“Rest Cure”
Charlotte Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a chilling account of a woman’s descent into insanity. Her downfall is only hastened by her husband’s treatment, something known as “rest cure” at the time. This method of treatment was essentially trapping the patient in a prison of both body and mind. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an in-depth analysis of the pitfalls of such an innocent sounding treatment to mental illness. It provides a unique perspective on the “logical” men who thought they knew best, and the women who suffered for it emotionally and physically.
The narrator of the story is one of those women who have been forced to suffer through the rest cure, which consists of lying in bed all day, day after day, only eating foods rich in fat and not being allowed to write or otherwise express emotion. In short, the rest cure is a prescription for a dull, sedentary life. [i]“I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.”[ii] Naturally, in order to keep her from thinking about her condition, her husband leaves her all alone to her thoughts.
It is solely from her perspective that the treatment is experienced. We do not see things from the husband’s perspective, so we can only speculate as to the logic he uses to justify this treatment. The protagonist herself does not seem to know what her husband has planned for her at the beginning of the story. She herself dismisses her own concerns about the house, believing that her husband has always been the more logical one of the two.[iii]
It is this kind of self doubt that prevented the women of Charlotte Gilman’s time (late nineteenth century) from taking control of their own lives. They were always led to believe that they were not only “hysterical,” but also that they were the inferior gender, meant to be coddled and told what to do. Women were trained not to think for themselves. After all why should they? Thinking was the man’s job. It was only when the women were incapable of doing their wifely duties that their mental health seemed to be of concern.
Charlotte Gilman herself experienced the rest cure’s dehumanization and borderline imprisonment at the hands of the inventor of the treatment, Doctor Silas Weir Mitchell. She was told to “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. . . . Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.”[iv] So, while she may have been able to read sometimes, she was never able to express her own emotions. In fact, she was expressly forbidden from doing so through the medium of writing. Gilman apparently found this treatment to be suffocating and could not bear it. She later wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a semiautobiographical account of her experiences with the rest cure.[v]
Although Gilman did admit that “The Yellow Wallpaper” contains its fair share of “embellishments” (for example Gilman never experienced hallucinations of an auditory or visual nature),[vi] the story resonated with readers long after it was published. It is our morbid curiosity that drives us to read stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The story is so terrible but so plausible at the same time that it makes the reader wonder if such terrible doctors existed. Although they did certainly exist, some people believe that Doctor Mitchell was not the villain that Gilman may have made him out to be.
The good doctor, having served during the American Civil War as a surgeon for the U.S. Army, saw his fair share of pain and suffering, and nearly had a mental breakdown because of it. This made him “unsympathetic”[vii] towards those he diagnosed with hysteria. Although many of Doctor Mitchell’s patients saw success with his treatment, and he may have meant well, those he diagnosed with hysteria ultimately ended up in worse shape. In the story the narrator is reduced to a near feral creature that “creeps”[viii] along the floor in an inhuman fashion.
Gilman was not the only famous patient he subjected to the rest cure. Famous female author Virginia Woolf was also a patient of Mitchell’s. She eventually got out from under the thumb of people like Mitchell, but this would not prevent her from taking her own life eventually. Had she had access to a more supportive form of mental healthcare, she may have recovered, but Mitchell and doctor’s like him cast mentally ill women into a single lot, rather than treating them as the unique cases that they were.
Had doctors at the time been more sensitive to the nuances of each mental illness, unnecessary suffering may have been avoided. Instead, like in the story, mental patients were either treated like children, criminals, or both. The result was the same, many patients were imprisoned, whether that was physically imprisoned, mentally imprisoned, or again, both. Doctor Mitchell may have felt that he was approaching his patients’ illnesses logically, but like the husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” he completely disregarded the emotional aspects of his treatments, which is the most important thing to remember when treating the mentally ill.
[i] Anne Styles “The Rest Cure, 1873-1925.” http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-stiles-the-rest-cure-1873-1925
[ii] Charlotte Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 1.17-1.18
[iii] “The Yellow Wallpaper”
[iv] http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-stiles-the-rest-cure-1873-1925
[v] “The Neurasthenia Rest Cure and Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell.” http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/nerves/rest/
[vi] http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-stiles-the-rest-cure-1873-1925
[vii] http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-stiles-the-rest-cure-1873-1925
[viii] “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
“The Machine”
John Armellino
ERH 203W 02
Major Knepper
Due 10/20/15
“What is The Machine?”
“The Machine” is a sonnet written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922. I must admit that the title of this poem has captured my childish, science-fiction loving attention. Before even reading it, I was thoroughly engrossed in thinking about what this “machine” could be. I immediately assumed it to be a sinister entity for some odd reason or another. It appears my initial assumption was correct. Rilke writes of a machine that “endangers all we have made.”[i] Clearly, this is not the typical sonnet about the horrors of romantic love, but rather a lovely, thought-provoking piece about our mysterious overlord, which you will see is an intricate metaphor for something else entirely. It is apparent in this sonnet that Rilke had adopted a rather bleak view of the world.
The metaphor that Rilke intends to make is that all of our lives are controlled by a mechanism that our society has created. This poem is part of series that Rilke wrote during the last two years of his life[ii], and I cannot help but feel that in his final days, the poet had at least partially succumbed to cynicism. Unlike most poets before and after him, Rilke does not humanize the inhuman. In “The Machine,” he automatizes the world, so that it itself is a machine.
We live in a world where nearly every aspect of our lives is affected by an unseen system, a system that feeds on conflict. It seems Rilke believed that this system is a danger to our lives, and our freedom. As a young boy, Rilke was nearly a victim of this system. His father was a former officer in the Austrian armed forces and wished for his son to be the same, so young Rilke was sent to a military school.[iii] Rilke however, was a born artist, and eventually made it to another school where he could begin his long and illustrious literary career.[iv] His parents were the extension of a machine that had a predetermined destiny all set for the young writer.
What is this “Machine” though? It is indifferent to creation and destruction. It performs both equally with vigor, and with a desire to keep us from escaping. Where does it think we would escape? And How? Rilke points to a “sacred dwelling that we do not own.”[v] He may be referring not to a physical place, but to a simpler lifestyle, one that is closer to nature. Perhaps Rilke believed this “Machine” was industry. After all, factories do create the weapons, armor, and tools of war. And, of course, war destroys all in its path. Without industry would our lives not become simpler, purer? The Machine (or those who propagate its existence) would want to prevent that, since we would no longer rely on its incessant production.
As long as people have existed, conflict between each other has existed as well. How would a lack of industry make anything better? Rilke was born during the industrial revolution,[vi] so it is a likely possibility that he saw the rapid expansion of industry as terrifying and unnatural. The world became impatient, as “the carver’s hands take too long to feel its way.”[vii] Instant gratification was becoming the norm as production of nearly everything increased on a massive scale. The skilled craftsman was becoming obsolete, and in his place is a dark machine, incomprehensible in its massiveness and hunger for our wealth. It steals the “mystery “[viii] of life. After all what do we need nature for if the Machine already provides us with all we need?
It makes sense that Rilke would write of industry as being the “Machine.” As I discussed earlier, young Rilke got his pinky caught in a cog of the machine before managing to pull free. Had he become an officer like his father wished, Rilke would have been sucked into the storm of World War I and who knows what would have become of the man? Perhaps thoughts like these passed through Rilke’s mind as he witnessed the war, which had forced him to flee his beloved home of Paris.[ix] The First Great War must have had a profound impact on the man. It was the first war that was industrialized on a massive scale, with people being fed into the machine as if human sacrifice itself had been mechanized.
This “Machine” has been a constant presence in human existence for the past few hundred years. It thrives on conflict. “It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.” It is always seeking greater efficiency, and often we need to institute laws to prevent industry from infringing on our basic human rights, the most important of which is the right to freedom from tyranny.
Rilke has experienced all the negative effects of the “Machine,” an entity that is indifferent to the suffering of people. It can be embodied by the rich who profit off of it, or by the poor who are strangled by it. But, no matter who you are, it seems Rilke believed that “The Machine” rules us all, with little chance for escape.
[i] Rainer Maria Rilke. “The Machine.” Sonnets to Orpheus
[ii] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rainer-maria-rilke
[iii] https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/rainer-maria-rilke
[iv] poetryfoundation.org
[v] “The Machine”
[vi] poetryfoundation.org
[vii] “The Machine”
[viii] “The Machine”
[ix] poets.org
American Lit Reflective Essay
John Armellino
ERH 206
Major Knepper
Due 5/1/15
Reflective Essay
Within the course of the American Literary Traditions class, I learned a great deal about American gothic horror conventions and even, surprisingly, some history. I suppose that should not come as a surprise to me. Most of these works were all written during the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the writers we have explored in this class are Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Charles Chesnutt. I even showed a presentation on Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned author and statesman. An interesting thing I learned about all these authors (except perhaps Douglass) is their use of the element of the uncanny and supernatural in their works to point out specific issues in society, one of the most notable issues being slavery in America. American gothic horror appears to be a way for Americans to criticize their society without seeming like hypocrites. Throughout the course, all the works I have read were creative metaphors for America’s dark, untold history, and I have learned much from it. All I had to do was read, and reflect on what I have read, and the connections were there.
I enjoyed writing about all of these authors, particularly Poe and Hawthorne. The two authors are notorious for writing strange, uncanny stories. The protagonists of these stories are often unreliable narrators and/or slowly losing control of themselves. I wrote about two of these works in my research essay, “Hop-Frog” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” In another essay I wrote about the element of the uncanny, I mentioned Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” All three of these works I have read seem to provide some commentary on post and pre-revolution America. However, all three have a different message about society.
From “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” I took note of the “coming of age” type story. This could easily be translated to a metaphor of Colonial America maturing and becoming the nation it was meant to be, albeit at a heavy price. America was “forced to grow up.” From this work I took away the lesson that American history was never as clean cut and black and white as it was made out to be in grade school. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is a personal story that I could easily translate into a metaphor for the United States’ bloody history.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” may also serve as a metaphor. Besides revealing an “ugly truth” within the main character, the story can also be a symbol for slavery. The main character is treated as a slave himself, being a man taken far away from his home and mistreated by a cruel council. It was not too difficult to make the connection. They stripped away Hop-Frog’s true name and christened him with the namesake of an animal, much like enslaved Africans had their identities stolen, and were treated like animals rather than human beings. The more I thought about it, the more the analogy made sense to me. These are basic metaphors. What I was truly interested in, and really learned from was the use of the uncanny to convey a message.
I have always loved gothic literature, but in this course I started to understand the nuances behind it. Why did the authors feel it was necessary to use the factor of the uncanny in their works? By “taking a reader out of his or her comfort zone” the authors of these works lead their audience to engage in some critical thinking and reflection. I know I started to think about literature on a more critical level because of this. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” got me started. The small village that is the namesake of the story rested “on the very edge of the bizarre.” It felt as though it resided in it’s “own separate plane of existence.” I only began to understand why after several class discussions of the subject. The town of Sleepy Hollow feels so strange to us because it is full of unique traditions that stem from a foreign land, something that many Americans were (and still are) uncomfortable with. I began to understand that the American experience was seen as constant change and creating new traditions. The older ways of doing things may have been looked down upon and even feared a little bit. If Ichabod Crane was supposed to represent the common American at the time the story was written, then it is almost certainly a commentary on their shortsightedness and disregard for foreign cultures.
It may be difficult to see where I made these connections, how I learned these things, but it really just came down to thinking. The class discussions helped me tremendously, when it came to analyzing the individual works we have read. All I had to do was ponder what I have just read and the more I did that the more conclusions I reached, right or wrong. Of course, it helped having basic knowledge of American history, but other than that all I needed was to read.
Source for Rhetorical Traditions II Reflective Essay (Notes on Burke)
These are all notes taken straight from my notebook on the subject.
Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism views the real world and human interactions as if it were a drama, like a play.
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…”
Burke believed that to understand human acts, one had to understand human motives. Dramatism exists to find what motivates our actions.
A simple way to remember how dramatism works is with the pentad
action, agents, agency, setting, purpose
Dramatism is almost scientific
“The root of all rhetoric is guilt redemption”
Source for Rhetorical Traditions II Reflective Essay (Research Project)
John Armellino
Major Garriott
ERH 202
3/5/15
The Impact of the Horror Film on Rhetoric
The invention of film, in my opinion, is the largest catalyst for the greatest new rhetorical medium in history. The idea of film, of moving pictures as a storytelling device came to life all the way back in the 19th century. Film photography was born in 1839. Since its invention, film has been continually improved upon as an artistic medium and of the largest, most lucrative industries in the world. Film has had quite a journey since its inception until now, and that journey is where film changed rhetorical practices as we knew it. When artists realized the potential of film, it became an entirely new medium for rhetoric to sink its teeth into. The medium of film does allow for society to look at itself with both praise and criticism. On a smaller scale, film can be used to look at individuals and how their minds work. One particular genre does an excellent, and unsettling job of examining societal issues and fears, and by extension, our own individual fears. That genre is horror, and it has allowed us to look at the most terrifying thing of all, our minds.
I would like to provide a little bit of context to my examination of horror films. So first, I will give a brief history lesson, and hopefully show you how film has evolved to where the horror genre can be so skillfully used to demonstrate humanity’s weaknesses.
Due to technological constraints at the beginning of film history, it was difficult for movies with coherent plots to be made. In fact, one of the first films to feature a sizable, mature plot was “The Great Train Robbery,” which was made in 1903. It is considered the “first blockbuster.” Films following “The Great Train Robbery” used the same formula of black and white, good versus evil plots in which evil triumphs for most of the film until good is the ultimate victor in the last act. Even today we see bland, uncomplicated plots like this, but ultimately films evolved to convey more complex ideas. That is why I will be focusing on a specific area and genre of films. Consider the emergence of popular horror movie franchises in the 1970s and 80s, particularly “slasher” films. While many non-horror films have been used as a form of social commentary (King Kong and slavery, Fight Club and consumerism), horror films act as commentary on our deepest, darkest fears and/or our secret desires. Of all the genres of film, horror is the most thought provoking in a rhetorical sense. Horror films, to me at least, leave a certain impression. When I finish watching a good one, I cannot stop thinking about it for a long time. Usually this is a result of the film having a sort of layered feel to it. Did I fully understand the message that the filmmaker was trying to get across? Is there more to it than I realized? A good horror film does not necessarily confuse you, but does provide enough of a mystery to keep you thinking.
To provide an example of this, I would like to nod to the excellent HBO series True Detective. While the show is not your traditional horror (all the murders that the detectives are trying to solve happen off screen), there is a dark atmosphere to the show. One of the main characters himself noted that the “psychosphere… left a bad taste” in his mouth, “like ash and aluminum.” What he means by this is the general personality; the atmosphere of a place is determined by the minds of those who live in it. In the setting of True Detective, the minds of sick men and women were polluting the atmosphere, causing it to effect everyone. This, plus the excess of references to weird, Lovecraftian horror makes True Detective a disturbing look into our own psyche, and a great example of the rhetorical use of horror. Horror, as a rhetorical device, reveals our “psychosphere,” the darker world around us we prefer to ignore.
Of course, this all depends on how one defines rhetoric. As long as I have known about it, I have seen rhetoric as “language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience”. Is that not what a good horror film aims to do? The lasting mark of a good film (but horror in particular) is a scarred audience. Of course I do not mean so scarred as to cause permanent psychological damage, but a horror movie audience should always be disturbed and titillated at the same time, and should remain that way long after leaving the theatre. John Carpenter’s infamous film The Thing is a perfect example of this. The titular creature, an alien beast without form, takes on the appearance of members of a small group of men in a remote Antarctic station. Neither the characters, nor the audience know who is human and who is not. The ensuing panic and paranoia is disturbing as the audience asks itself “is this how I would react?” “Would I have a chance of surviving this?” The idea of a hostile, shape shifting creature that looks and sounds like us plays into the attitudes of the Cold War era during which the film was made and released (1982). Americans had this idea that Soviet spies could be everywhere, who looked and talked just like us. The threat of the unknown, of a camouflaged foreign hostility was definitely prevalent during the time. The Thing made Americans fear something worse than that: our own compulsions. The characters in The Thing all turned on each other at some point in the film.
Perhaps that is what the horror genre is all about. If film were to be described as a “language,” with “the analogy between the word and the shot,” then horror is a dialect of that language. This language is used to discuss the darker sides of human behavior, even in those films with an unearthly and/or unnatural antagonist. The greatest example of this is the horror subgenre of zombie films.
Of course the undead are terrifying in their own right. They are walking corpses that want to eat us, so if that is not scary then I do not know what is. But, zombies can be used, and have been used as effective social commentary. George A. Romero is the pioneer of this subgenre, and his films to this day remain some of the best within it. Each one has targeted some disdainful aspect of society. The first film in his series, The Night of the Living Dead, takes a glaring look at issues of the time (1968). Doctor Martin Luther King was recently assassinated and the war in Vietnam was raging. The main character of film is a black man named Ben who must take control of the situation, that being him and a group of white people holed up in a house trying to survive the zombie-infested night. Relations are a little tense at best, and outright hostile at worst.
A young black man leading the otherwise white group of survivors in their fight for survival may have made white audiences uncomfortable, but he is a likeable character, and unless anyone in the audience is a total bigot, they learn to root for him. Unfortunately (and somewhat ironically), Ben is the sole survivor of the night, only to be shot dead by a “redneck posse” after being mistaken for a zombie. The commentary is unmistakable. Just when 1960s era audiences learn to sympathize with a black man, he is killed by a group of white men. Even after fighting so hard to earn others’ trust, he is betrayed by those sworn to protect him (the police).
The films discussed in this paper were just the tip of the iceberg. Horror, let alone film as a whole, is an excellent medium to convey social fears, and many horror flicks do it beautifully. There is nothing more terrifying than the human mind, and we now have a medium capable of demonstrating that terror with the visual language it deserves.
Rhetorical Traditions II Reflective essay
John Armellino
ERH 202WX
Major Garriott
Due 5/1/15
Reflective Essay on Dramatism
In this course I have been paying particular attention to rhetoric in films, specifically films of the horror genre. I have learned that this community utilizes the horror genre to study the darker recesses of the human mind, and what drives us to commit both terrible and heroic acts. This topic means that I have been primarily focused on Kenneth Burke, a rhetorician of the 20th century. As the course progressed, I used my knowledge of the horror film genre to further my understanding of Burke, and then used that knowledge to better understand the way he defined rhetoric. I will explain how I did this. You see, (good) horror films focus on the unseen, the unknown qualities of life that we do not often think about, but are there in our subconscious. Horror filmmakers of the late twentieth century took this aspect of the genre to a whole new, gruesomely fun level (more blood, more humor, more commentary on society). While most horror movies may not be the genius examination of the human condition that I would like them to be, they do tend to focus on the strangest and vilest of human behaviors. Although their subjects are strange, horror films always have the familiar element of flawed human characters that make mistakes like we do, and do terrible things like a lot of us are more capable of than we realize. I started to, through the lens of the horror film genre, learn and understand the theories of the rhetorician Kenneth Burke, who discusses what drives humans to do what they do. I found a definition of rhetoric that I was able to comprehend and enjoyed learning about.
Burke’s definition of rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents,” which makes sense to me. I always saw rhetoric as the use of language to persuade others. Films very much make an attempt “to form attitudes” in others, but I was never sure how that worked exactly until taking this course. When reading about Burke’s theory of dramatism, I started to understand not just the purpose of rhetoric in art (exploring our actions through our motivations), but how it works. Burke’s outlook on the world as a drama unfolding before our eyes made complete sense to me the first time I read about it. Drama as a metaphor for life struck me as especially applicable to the horror genre, in which certain horror tropes (creepy kids, haunted houses, etc.) emerged and were experimented with in order to analyze human and societal behavior, specifically our fears. I discussed the horror film The Thing and its look into our survival instincts and paranoia. In other words, the horror genre is examining our motivations. Burke believed that “to understand human acts, one must understand human motives.” He created what is called the Dramatistic Pentad, a set of terms that aims to explain why people behave the way that they do. Since it is a pentad, there are five terms: the act (what is done), the scene (the setting, location), the agents (who is acting), agency (how the agents act), and purpose (why do they act). All are factors in the drama that we create.
This theory of rhetoric came easily to me, since I have always been good at analyzing films. As an avid movie buff I enjoy examining characters and their motivations, so Burke’s pentad plays right into this hobby of mine. Horror movies have long been a subject of my obsessions, and in my research essay, I took a look at how horror films of the late 20th century were used to bring societal ills to light, as well act as “commentary on our deepest, darkest fears and/or our secret desires.” When I learned about Burke’s pentad, I could perfectly place all the categories; the setting, the characters, the action, the agents, and the purpose. It is so easily translatable to film that I could begin to use the pentad to analyze real life situations. Now, that may seem contradictory, but when I watch a good horror film, I always compare it to reality. I do not necessarily examine whether zombies or shape shifting aliens could exist in the real world (they totally could), no, I compare the behaviors of the main characters to how humans behave in reality. Burke’s pentad is a simple, elegant way for me to translate the rhetorical message behind a film to real life, since the pentad is meant to assess real human beings.
The theory of dramatism, to me, is almost empirical in its use. It may not be hard science in the traditional use of the term, but I found that I could apply its elements to drama and reality. All I had to do was plug in variables until I had a conclusion that made sense. I may have had a rather roundabout way of learning this particular subject, but Kenneth Burke has provided a highway of sorts to understanding horror films as a rhetorical genre. Once I understood the theory of dramatism as an almost scientific examination of human behavior, it all clicked in my head. The theory is easily applicable to any genre, but the horror genre has always struck me as the most interesting of any class of film. And now, I am able to effectively examine films within that group more effectively.
ERH 202 Blog post (#13)
Psychology is the “study of mind and behavior.” The Twentieth Century saw the advent of concepts like behaviorism (study of observable and measurable behaviors) as well as the interpretation of dreams as the desires/fears of the subconscious. With the science of psychology beginning to take shape as a quantifiable, rather than mystical and abstract science, there could be more focus on the what drives people to do what they do. Rhetorical practices used to persuade and convince could make use of the knowledge of what motivates humans. This is especially true in the Twentieth Century, in which there is an emphasis on the observable in both disciplines.