[SOLVED] Rhetoric Analysis
Can you help me understand this Writing question?
1. Before class today you should have decided what story you think you want to base your RA Essay on.
You should also write a “hypothesis” (an early, tentative thesis statement) that you think you may use in the RA.
Please make a submission here that includes both of these things– tell me what story you’re going to focus on, and write out your hypothesis.
2. PART ONE: RA SOURCE SEARCH
Find two (3) sources that you think can help you write the RA by understanding more about the stories we’ve read and the conversation(s) surrounding them.
TIPS:
Reviews and opinion pieces about the stores we’ve read are somewhat helpful, because they help us understand the conversations that already surround the author’s work. (They may even intimidate you as you notice that so much has already been said about these stories– how can there be anything new to say?)
Warning: using these sources alone in your essay will invite you to assemble the thoughts of other people without adding your own voice fully to that conversation.
You’ll soon want to branch out to things like…
A. Sources that can tell you how society felt about an issue or set of issues at that time. How did people feel about childrearing? How did they feel about marriage, work, birth, death? Start with an issue you see examined in a story we’ve read, and then find out when that story was published so that you know what time period to examine. Don’t just look at how people felt in general– try and find out if there were any major shifts in opinion, any events that would have been in the public consciousness, any debates or conversations that were going on or evolving at this point in time. Yeah, that’s ambitious. No, one source probably won’t tell you all that. Keep digging.
B. Sources that tell you more about the genre (dystopia, in this case). Maybe even sources that examine the way this genre was changing at the time your story was published. Remember that genres are living things– they change and evolve as time passes. What stage of evolution was this genre at when the story was written? Did this story challenge the genre? Push it forward? Send it back 100 years?
These suggestions are based on the RA Prompts I’ve provided. Depending what you think you may want to write on, your choice of sources will change. But remember: you’ve studied the text and become an expert. Outside sources tell you about the outside world that the text was interacting with. They’re an important part of the equation that lets us do rhetorical analysis– if we know about the text AND the world, we can then examine how they interact with each other.
PART TWO: POST THEM HERE
Post a link to your two source citations from the RA Source Search above, and write a short note below each source explaining what it is and why you’ve chosen it. When everyone’s posted, we’ll have a repository of helpful sources that you might choose to use to build an argument in your RA.
