Rhetorical Analysis - Science topic

Dear Readers,

This is the latest news from my ongoing work to help bring the arts into better communications with the sciences. Have you studied Poe's texts that may be considered proto-science fiction (before this term existed?) Please share your work here, as well.

Wolf Forrest will speak at our Hard-Sci SF Zoom group on Jan. 6th and we will then publish that talk on YouTube. DETAILS AS ATTACHMENT.

MORE on Hard-Science SF Zoom project:

We have a Zoom group called The Hard-Science Science Fiction Group. If anybody wishes to be part of this group project or "lab" please let me know via message. I will add you to the list because I don't always rmember to post new talk od plays here. (Too busy.)

We also are involved with the Planet Zoom players, who record Zoom play adaptation of classic SF and then publish these on YouTube. (Many good works were never adapted to film or TV.)

Please add your thoughts on this. Sometimes we in the US miss what other countries and linguistic groups think of Poe.

What are rhetorical stylistic considerations for speakers or writers to negotiate "distance...with regards to a question or a problem"? I'm grateful to Nick Turnbull at The University of Manchester, for neatly describing this perspective of rhetoric offered by Michel Meyer. [In Turnbull, Nick (2006) "Problematology and Contingency in the Social Sciences; (2017) "Political Rhetoric and its Relationship to Context: a new theory of the rhetorical situation, the rhetorical and the political"]

One example is mentioned in my book chapter, "Reform Advocacy of Michael Kirby." Link at:

Associate Justice Scalia of the United States Supreme Court was politely but firmly invited to probe a broader view of originalism as long ago as 2010 when he visited Australia – by The Hon Michael Kirby AC, CMG, international human rights jurist and former justice of the High Court of Australia (1996-2009).

It appears the current propagators of originalism must rely on some willful blindness to conveniently overlook the recorded suggestions from the Founders of the United States that the Constitution would need to be interpreted, adjusted, or changed to accommodate unforeseen or unforeseeable circumstances.

This is just one of the ways that Kirby imaginatively uses language to invite openness to new understandings.

Other thoughts?

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to invite pointers to references on these topic. If anybody would like collaborate on a panel for the Modern Language Association or to write an essay, please comment below.

OUTLINE OF POINTS

DISCUSSION TITLE: The Rhetoric of Naming Urban Spaces

Field of Socio-Onomastics (does this field cover the topic here?)

-----Journal of Onomastics

Architectural journals dealing with onomastics

Protocols for naming in publicly-funded Research Institutions

Shift in naming

Ethos and Power of Naming

Hello everyone.

I'm trying to select the optimal approach to my research study and I'm having some doubts about solely using semiotics. My plan is to carry out a semiotic analysis on a small selection of visual texts (video ads), however I intend to not only analyse the mise-en-scène, sound, and camerawork, but also examine the text that appears on screen and what the voiceover says throughout the length of the commercials.

Thus, my question would be if I look at let's call them verbal aspects, would that mean I will also have to adopt discourse analysis or rhetorical analysis as a research method along semiotics? I'm asking this because I feel like a semiotic analysis would only help me to uncover the visual meaning and if I look at 'written text' I should employ a different approach. But on the other hand, I'm not trying to go in depth with the analysis. I would say that much of what I would do would involve an interpretation, similar to analysing a metaphor.

Thank you in advance for your answers. Any help is appreciated.

Dear Colleagues,

I put up this question at RG in order to find out what is being studied about the effects on people of social media memes as they attempt to find reliable information regarding social media memes.

In my original data set about the addictive power of memes to shape memory storage and alter personality, I was mainly looking at political memes.

It may be also important to study the effects of memes upon people's ability to find verifiable information. So please post any studies that you are aware of so that we can compile these in one place. I hope this inspires some study because I already know the power of memes from my past work on rhetoric, communication theory, and meme addictive behavior.

Here are an initial couple of links to studies which I have not read as yet, but which may be of interest. Check the bibliographies or Works Citeds, as well.

Social Media Reigned by Information or Misinformation About COVID-19: A Phenomenological Study

Social Sciences & Humanities Open Online journal:

MIT Psychologists study:

Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention

http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Covid-19%20fake%20news%20ms_psyarxiv.pdf

Peer-edited Polish Journal

SOMEBODY TO BLAME: ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE OTHER IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK

And also, can anyone point me to a researcher who specializes in Rhetorical Discourse Analysis?

What distinguishes fine art from narrative art? Is this distinction (Bourdieu) important to maintain? For whom? Why? All of these issues in Art History are heating up due to recent shows of van Gogh's painting that cite letters to his mother and sister (primarily) in which he explains why he painted Bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles as one prominent example. van Gogh states the painting was inspired by his reading of George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical and was vG's attempt to recreate these spartan surroundings of the novel's protagonist Felix Holt, yet to do so in bright colors.

Why have traveling shows often omitted van Gogh's Le Borinage paintings, esp. shows coming to the US? And another mystery, why is the work of Vincent van Gogh with the miners sometimes referred to as an unhappy early period that van Gogh more happily grew out of when he learned to paint better. What subjectivity holds these views and why are they the foregrounded view, at least in English-language studies of van Gogh at this time.

Will rhetorical analysis added to the standard formal approaches to painting aid in gaining a more parallax view of this painter and of art history in general?

Your comments are most welcome.

As I am interested in any (social scientist's) research on missionaries I would like to gain insights in a "rhetorical analysis" about acculturation of missionaries. Thanks.

Dear Colleagues,

I am putting together a collection of essays on Literature and Class for the publisher Routledge.

Some of you may look at this question with different eyes than mine.

So please tell me about any experiences you have writing about literature through the lens of social class.

Have you done such analysis?

What theory did you find most helpful?

How do you define social class when it comes to writing about it in the arts?

Thanks for any and all ideas and comments.

Dear Colleagues at RG,

As a college English instructor who has taught everything from literature to scientific writing, I was taught ways to read essays in order to grade them that were far from my own field.

Scientists often complain that in this time of increasing specialization they can no longer understand research reports from domains outside their own.

Do some colleagues have methods to share that allow use to understand essays or technical reports outside our own fields?

In the final stage of my PhD dissertation, I am stuck about how to theorize from my narrative data such that my theorizing is 'not functionalist' in nature but 'something new or novel' - an advice that most supervisors would want their PhD students to heed.

For example, in my study about the rhetorical practices of two foreign teachers in my university, how I read/analysed Teacher A is this:

Her rhetorical practices in the classroom are targeted at two domains: academic (accomplishment of personal goals, e.g., finishing a university degree) and industry (accomplishing life, e.g., entering the workforce as a knowledgeable and competent employee).

Any idea about theorizing from this interpretation? Appreciate any thoughts.

Thank you.

Is the Indian-born cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak's "subaltern" theory a valid approach to the US Rust Belt dominant narrative?

This question grows from the study of symbolic conversion theory and the work of Gayatri Spivak on inequality and voice. especially her landmark essay "Can the Subaltern speak?"

Ernest Bormann called words and phrases applied to people, events, and places not present "fantasy themes." These themes tend to cluster into positive groups around one's own region or group and negative clusters around "the other."

When a group of people or a region is named with what Bormann would describe as negative "fantasy themes" by outside media, are they colonized by economic and media to the extent that they have been effectively silenced? The very fact that the US Rust Belt region and its inhabitants have no voice in the US media then be cited as evidence that they are incapable of articulating a narrative for themselves and may be described with external narratives with no necessity of dialogue.

So is this rhetorical situation the beginning of a true caste system?

The dirty jobs are not only held in disdain by traditional elites but also progressive ecology-minded media. Thus, the dominant narrative follows that omission is acceptable and that there is no need to hear from this region, the rhetorical construct called The Rust Belt.

Spivak usually is cited for Western colonial issues but can this sort of silence be analyzed rhetorically by her methods?

Hi everyone, I'm writing a dissertation about portrayal of women in newspaper before independence (1926-1927) using discourse analysis. I'm using Discursive Psychology as a framework but had been rejected by panel because it's for spoken discourse. One of the panel suggest to use positive discourse. I try to find out about it but not so much contribute to my research. Any suggestions of journal & extra reading would be appreciated! Thank you!

Often we do that job quite well enough on ourselves. But also we still play tapes in our minds going all the way back to grade school. There are various "overcoming writing anxiety" exercises out there.

Do you have an answer?

Who has told you you can't write?

Do you overcome this?

How?

The current Metropolitan Opera production (Feb. 2017) is Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka.  This opera contains what may be viewed as current events references. 

The Grove Dictionary of Music entry on rhetoric and music states that after the Baroque period, the rhetorical underpinnings of music were no longer studied.  But in the 20th C., such highlighted rhetoric in art music is causing a revival of interest.

QUOTE

What still remains to be fully explained is how these critical interrelationships often controlled the craft of composition. These developments are unclear partly because modern musicians and scholars are untrained in the rhetorical disciplines, which since the beginning of the 19th century have largely disappeared from most educational and philosophical system. It was only in the early 20th century that music historians rediscovered the importance of rhetoric as the basis of aesthetic and theoretical concepts in earlier music. An entire discipline that had once been the common property of every educated man has had to be rediscovered and reconstructed during the intervening decades, and only now is it beginning to be understood how much Western art music has depended on rhetorical concepts. ("Rhetoric and Music." Grove Dictionary of Music. Blake Wilson et al.)

UNQUOTE

Does anyone know of research that specifically analyzes the rhetorical aspects of modern era opera since Wagner to now?

Given that directors have much leeway in creating subtexts in classic and contemporary works, this is a topic that is open for more study.

Is anyone analyzing film rhetorically?  I refer both to the rhetorical structures in a film and the rhetorical approches that film critics adopt.

There are class, race, and gender structures in films that viewer respond to and reject.  Critics may consciously or unconsciously use terms that bias perception of a film due to "normalized" terms used in describing a film. "Normalized" can mean that a film is being attacked by a film critic while the terms seem innocuous enough.  For instance, "sentimental" is often used for certain mass appeal films and films that depict the lower social strata.  In Europe the term "kitsch" often refers to films popular with the poorer classes of society.  In the US the term "sentimental" serves the same function.

I am thinking of a possible study of H. G. Wells' Morlock characters in his 1895 novella The Time Machine.  The Morlocks and Eloi were two separate species of human descendants.  The Eloi were the scion of the UK landed gentry and the Morlocks the offsrping of factory workers and household domestics.

I am theorizing that, since the name Morlock actually exists that perhaps Wells meant someone in particular.  It could be analogous to Dante's sening his enemies to the lowest rung of Hell in The Divine Comedy.

A second line of inquiry is whether anyone is studying J. R. R. Tolkien's Mordor in Lord of the Rings, which seems obviously derivative of Morlocks.  More locks to more doors.

I welcome your comments.

Respectfully,

Gloria McMillan

There are a number of English resources available (AIFdb, Araucaria, NoDE, UKP corpora...), but I am not aware of freely available corpora for the German language.

Do such resources exist and where may I find them?

Thanks a lot.

Cheers,

Martin

The earlier mode of Greek and Roman civilization of Rhetoric analysis.

Anadiplosis, according to Dupriez (1991), refers to the repetition of a word or words in successive clauses in such a way that the second clause starts with the same word which marks the end of the previous clause. Some language

use a variant or a modification of this literary device: the “reduced” anadiplosis. The infrequent use of this device either in English or its variant in other languages makes it less knowable. That is why most of translators failed to render it stylistically and semantically in their translations.

In teaching Balaghah (arabic rhetorical studies).