{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Steven Mailloux--Rhetorical Power","description":"Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I\u2019m Mary Hedengren and I\u2019ve been reading A Christmas Carol this holiday season because I\u2019m playing Mrs. Crachit in a community theatre production. And wow. There is a story behind that. But becaue I was interested in The christmas carol, so I started reading The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford\u2019s history of Dickens\u2019s masterpeice. I was surprised to hear how A Christmas Carol had solidified Christmas as we know it, a home-and-family holiday rather than a racacus drunken orgy of disrule. Yeah, Christmas used to be like that. In fact, there was a debate about Christmas raging over several centuries when Scrooge came on the scene. After Dickens, though, industrialists started giving their employees Christmas Day off, and everyone started sending their workers the ubiquitous Christmas turkey. Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading Dickens\u2019s Christmas Carol first cried his eyes out and then committed to donate money to the poor. Even Dickens\u2019s best frienemy and critic, William Makepeace Thackery, was deeply moved by it. Dickens\u2019s book had, in the words of Lord Jeffrey \u201cfostered more kindly feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence\u201d than all the sermons in all the churches pervious. So if literature is so powerful to change the way people live, why isn\u2019t it considered rhetoric? That question is probably best addressed in Steven Mailloux (My-U)\u2019s Rhetorical Power. In the book that would in some ways define his career, Mailloux advances a rhetorical perspective of literature that would present a middle ground between idealist and realist literary theory. He calls the exercise of this perspective \u201crhetorical hermeneutics\u201d which he suggests as an \u201canti-Theory theory\u201d that will  \u201cdetermine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchanges\u201d (15). It isn\u2019t just the content or, to use the old fashioned phrase, \u201ctheme\u201d of a book that impacts people, but the way the story is drawn through, and the techniques that the author gets us to buy into. Such a reading differs wildly from the notions of New Criticisms that would restrict interpretation to the page and from even Stanley Fish\u2019s narrow academic interpretative community. Instead, the work is rooted in a specific history, rhetorical tradition, and cultural conversation (145-6). We can be impacted by 19th century books, but not the in same way that Lord Jeffrey and Stevenson were. There are conversations going on and arguments made in the book catalogs of any culture. Mailloux claims that this perspective is not only engaged in the world outside the text, but also describes the temporal experience of reading. In this way, literature exits circles of elite academic interpretative communities and instead belongs to the community of readers at large. The text has an individual influence as well. Mailloux describes how a text can educate a reader (41) and train the reader to see and think a certain way as the text progresses (99). This education depends on the form of the work, how the work develops from premise to premise. Moby Dick is Mailloux\u2019s main example of this kind of trained reading. The disappearing narrator through chapters isn\u2019t just an error; it\u2019s an education. In this way, rhetorical hermeneutics seem to draw on both Kenneth Burke\u2019s discussion of form in Counter-statement and Wayne Booth\u2019s concerns about immoral narration in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While Mailloux uses Moby Dick as his primary example of the education of the reader within the pages of a book, he spends more time discussing the way that a text\u2019s educating qualities relate to a community\u2019s debate, and what better example could he use than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?     In Mark Twain\u2019s book, Mailloux has a prime example of the way a work \u201cincludes rhetorical histories of interpretative disputes\u201d (135).  Because of the way Twain\u2019s work was part of the national debates of the \u201cNegro Question\u201d and the \u201cBad Boy Boom,\u201d it can clearly demonstrate a reading that prioritizes not the \u201cisolated readers and isolated texts\u201d but the entire \u201crhetorical exchanges among interpreters embedded in discursive and other social practices at specific historical moments\u201d (133).  We often think of Huckleberry Finn in terms of race only, because that\u2019s the predominant issue from the book for our culture, but the issue of \u201cbad boys\u201d was even more pressing on Twain\u2019s contemporaries, which may seems a shocking undersight to modern readers. Huckleberry Finn was originally banned from some schools and library for showing a bad boy getting away with rebellion.  Mailloux demonstrates that there were many pieces of literature of all sorts discussing what to do with juvenile delinquent boys, and Twain\u2019s contribution in the unintentionally humane and thoughtful Huckleberry was a response to, and instigator of, some of the alarm. Moving from Mark Twain, Mailloux applies his theory to contemporary political disputes, demonstrating that this kind of reading practice isn\u2019t exclusive to formal literature. So we come full circle. Literature participates in a wider societal conversation, and our political conversations can benefit of a reading as intense as the one we give to literature. As Mailloux says \u201ctextual interpretation and rhetorical politics can never be separated\u201d (180).     So if you do a little light reading this holiday break, you might take a moment and wonder, what, exactly, are the political implications of what you\u2019re reading. If you found a deeper level of rhetorical discourse in your holiday reading, why not drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? This is Mary Hedengren, ruining your vacation from Mere Rhetoric. ","author_name":"Mere Rhetoric","author_url":"http:\/\/mererhetoric.libsyn.com","html":"