Oh No! Not Another
Definition of Rhetoric!
 “In short, rhetoric is a
mode of altering reality, not
by the direct application of
energy to objects, but by the
creation of discourse which
changes reality through the
mediation of thought and
action. The rhetor alters
reality by bringing into
existence a discourse of
such a character that the
audience, in thought and
action, is so engaged that it
becomes a mediator of
change.” (4)
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence
 Audience
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence
 Audience
 Constraints
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence: “An
imperfection marked by
urgency; it is a defect, an
obstacle, something
waiting to be done, a
thing which is something
than it should be” (6)
“Exigence”
The 2011 Libyan civil war began on 15 February
2011 as a civil protest and later evolved into a
widespread uprising. On 25 February, most of
Libya was reported to be under the control of the
Libyan opposition and not the government of
Muammar al-Gaddafi. Gaddafi remained in
control of the cities of Tripoli, Sirte and Sabha.
By 15 March, however, Gaddafi's forces had
retaken more than half a dozen lost cities. Except
for most of Cyrenaica and a few Tripolitania
cities (such as Misrata) the majority of cities had
returned to Gaddafi government control.
On 17 March, the United Nations Security
Council passed a resolution which authorized
member states "to take all necessary measures …
to protect civilians and civilian populated areas
under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab
Jamhariya, including Benghazi, while excluding
an occupation force”. This began a new phase in
the conflict.
Obama then responded to this
exigence with this speech.
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence
 Audience: “Since rhetorical
discourse produces change
by influencing the decision
and action of persons who
function as mediators of
change, it follows that
rhetoric always requires an
audience” (7)
“Audience”
Steve Jobs, the (previous)
CEO of Apple presents the
(then) newest version of the
iPhone (4) to an expectant
audience.
By appealing rhetorically to
his audience, Jobs aims to
encourage them to buy his
product.
“The Rhetorical Situation”
Bitzer conceives of the
rhetorical situation as
composed of three parts:
 Exigence
 Audience
 Constraints: “made up of
persons, events, objects, and
relations which are parts of
the situation because they
have the power to constrain
decision and action needed
to modify exigence” (8).
“Constraints”
The Debt Ceiling Crisis:
An increase in the debt ceiling requires the
approval of both houses of Congress.
Republicans and some Democrats insisted
that an increase in the debt ceiling be coupled
with a plan to reduce the growth in debt.
There were differences as to how to reduce
the expected increase in the debt. Initially,
nearly all Republican legislators (who held a
majority in the House of Representatives)
opposed any increase in taxes and proposed
large spending cuts. A large majority of
Democratic legislators (who held a majority
in the Senate) favored tax increases along
with smaller spending cuts. Supporters of the
Tea Party movement pushed their fellow
Republicans to reject any agreement that
failed to incorporate large and immediate
spending cuts or a constitutional amendment
requiring a balanced budget.
Rhetorical Situation Scavenger
Hunt
Now we’re going to go out in the world (or, at least, around
Williams Building) to see how rhetorical situations occur all
around us in different forms. I’ll give your group fifteen minutes
to browse around Williams to find three rhetorical artifacts and
then discern for each one what its exigence is, what the intended
audience is, and any constraints that the artifact presents. I
want each group to find one artifact that is primarily textual,
one that is primarily visual, and one other artifact of your
choice (be creative!).
After fifteen minutes, return to the classroom, take a five
minutes to organize your thoughts, elect a new spokesperson,
and be prepared to share with the class what your findings were.
What form of media first comes to
mind when you hear the word
“genre”?
What forms of media come to mind
when you hear the word “genre”?
 Movies
What forms of media come to mind
when you hear the word “genre”?
 Movies
 Books
What forms of media come to mind
when you hear the word “genre”?
 Movies
 Books
 Television
But Devitt’s looking further…
For Devitt, “genre is a dynamic response to and
construction of recurring situation, one that changes
historically and in different social groups, that adapts
and grows as the social context changes”(580).
Genres “construct and respond to situations”(578);
they are “possible responses that writers choose and even
combine to suit their situations” (579).
Consider the Zombie
Movie…
 First, here’s an earlier
incarnation of this genre:
Night of the Living Dead.
Here’s a movie created in
a context of intense race
and class conflict…
Consider the Zombie
Movie…
 Then, there’s the post9/11 zombie movie, 28
Days Later. Here’s a film
created in an atmosphere
of terror, and ongoing
epidemics…
But Devitt’s looking further…
Amy Devitt writes that“[t]reating genre as form
requires dividing form from content, with genre as the
form into which content is put”(574).
What does she mean by this?
What might the implications of such a division for
writers? Editors? Designers?
“Audience”
“In what follows, I want to open
further this problem in meaning, to
clarify some of the conceptual traps
in the way "audience" is typically
used, and to suggest some general
reference points that may be useful
in thinking about the theory and the
teaching of audience” (248).
The meanings of "audience,” diverge in two
general directions:
The Bitzer Camp
The Ong Camp
“. . .one toward actual people
external to a text, the audience
whom the writer must
accommodate. . .
. . .the other toward the text
itself and the audience implied
there, a set of suggested or
evoked attitudes, interests,
reactions, conditions of
knowledge which may or may
not fit with the qualities of
actual readers or listeners”
(249).
What does Ong
think?
“[h]owever real the readers are outside the
text, the writer writing must represent an
audience to consciousness in some
fashion; and the results of that "fiction"
appear in what the text appears to assume
about the knowledge and attitudes of its
readers and about their relationship to
the writer and the subject matter. . . More
accurately, the writer must create a
context into which readers may enter and
to varying degrees become the audience
that is implied there. (249)
What does Bitzer think?
According to Park, “Lloyd Bitzer's definition of the rhetorical
situation is a useful reference point here, since it. . .presents
external circumstances as forming a defining context to which
discourse must respond in fitting ways. The audience, in this
view, is a defined presence outside the discourse with certain
beliefs, attitudes, and relationships to the speaker or writer and
to the situation that require the discourse to have certain
characteristics in response. In Bitzer's terms the more structured
the rhetorical situation, the more precise its characteristics,
including those of the audience, the more it determines the
specific features and content of the discourse (248).
Audience?

1. Anyone who happens to listen to or to read a given discourse: "The audience
applauded." This meaning is inextricably rooted in common usage, but it is useless
and misleading in serious rhetorical analysis.

2. External readers or listeners as they are involved in the rhetorical situation: "The
writer misjudged his audience." This meaning of "audience" comes into play in
analyses of the historical situation in which a given discourse appeared or in studies
of the actual effect of discourse upon an audience.

3. The set of conceptions or awareness in the writer's consciousness that shape the
discourse as something to be read or heard. We try to get at this set of awarenesses in
shorthand fashion when we ask, "What audience do you have in mind?”

4. An ideal conception shadowed forth in the way the discourse itself defines and
creates contexts for readers. We can come at this conception only through specific
features of the text: "What does this paragraph suggest about the audience?" (250)
Reagan as
Audience?
Ronald Reagan cuts subsidies for mass
transit; a committee of mayors drafts a
letter to argue for continued support. It is
easy to say that Reagan is the audience for
this hypothetical letter. But it is not Reagan
as Reagan that the letter addresses but
Reagan in his position as President and as
representative of a set of attitudes on the
subject of mass transit. Whatever other
notions or knowledge of him as a person
the writers may have in mind will have to
be screened out as irrelevant. (251)
Audience=Contexts?
“Here it becomes clear that "audience" is merely a rough way
of pointing at that whole set of contexts. One can represent all
that in shorthand fashion by saying that the audience is people
who believe such and such, or who are interested in such and
such, or who have a certain level of background knowledge. But
a precise analysis of audience would have to examine, point by
point, what is being assumed as understood, what is elaborated,
what is assumed as the readers' range of attitudes or
preconceptions about the subject at hand, and so on” (251).
Chaim Perelman’s
“Universal Audience”
Perelman argues in The New
rhetoric: A Treatise on
Argumentation that “appeal to
reason is conceived as an appeal
to an ideal [universal]
audience—whether embodied
in God, in all reasonable and
competent men, in the man
deliberating or in an elite” (68).
Does this help?
Any questions?