This week of Rhetoric consisted of four passages of reading; two from Leith’s Words Like Loaded Pistols (WLLP) and two from Burns’ The Central Park Five. The first passage from WLLP, titled “on Invention” focused on the first of the “five parts” of rhetoric, the concept of invention. The idea of invention finds inspiration from Aristotle, who instructed that “the job of the rhetorician was to discover the best available means of inspiration.” The distinction between rhetorical and perhaps the societally defined invention, is that rhetorical invention does not involve creation in the individualistic sense, but rather the process of discovering the depth of a particular subject. Essentially, the rhetorician is not creating something from nothing, not rather uncovering and communicating pre-existing information in their area of focus. Also expressed in this passage, was the three Aristotelian lines of appeal, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos; which are appeal to qualification, appeal with information, and appeal to emotions respectively. The second passage from WLLP was on judicial rhetoric which focuses on the stasis, the issue. In this section, Leith introduced the Greco-Roman division of the questions of stasis, Conjectural, Definitional, Qualitative, and Translative.
The first two chapters of Burn’s The Central Park Five jumped into unraveling the scene of the controversial case. Chapter one began with a sympathetic description of some of the key characters in the case, while in a contrasting tone, depicted the crime ridden, racially divided state of New York City at the time. Chapter Two introduced details of the arrests, crime scene, and the interrogations of the suspected teens.
In the first excerpt of the documentary that was watched in class on Thursday, what immediately grabbed my attention was the way in which the directors, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon; utilized music to create tension. As the voice-overs described the breakdown of societal function and the screen showed decrepit streets with violence, crime and poverty; the music bounced between songs of rock and “gangsta rap”. Both genres of music are high tempo, heart pounding sounds, that not only raise the adrenaline of the listener, but both have historical significance for white and black culture. This music evokes pathological appeal in the listener, communicating to them the high energy, clashing, societal tension that may have influenced certain processes of events in the Central Park Jogger Case.
I am excited to see the judicial rhetoric that will be used in the case against the five teenagers. I anticipate that as we unravel details of the trial, there will be a plethora of logical fallacies in prosecuting argument and a lack of acknowledgment of those by the defense. I also expect to see racial bias and stereotype in the judicial proceedings. To aid in seeing err, I hope in the next classes to develop a more complete understanding of the difference between inartistic and artistic logos, as well as the distinction between certain pathos and logos appeals. I understand that Aristotle did not intend for the three appeals to be unique categorizes, and rather a blending, harmonious, multifaceted approach to appeal, however I currently have a hard time distinguishing between a logical pathological appeal and one that employs logos.
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