Rhetoric in Popular Culture ch. 5 - Brummett

Name of author, name of essay/chapter: Barry Brummett, Rhetoric in Popular Culture,  chapter 5.

Thesis:

In this chapter, Brummett talks about three lenses through which you can rhetorically criticize a text: feminist, dramatistic/narrative, and media centered. Feminist criticism starts with the assumption of an inequality between male and female, then attempts to explain where it comes from and how it is reinforced by culture and texts. It also searches for instances of female empowerment and emphasizes the equality of females and males. There are different approaches to this school of thought – liberal feminism, for example, focuses on reforming society, while Marxist feminism discusses the way economic inequality and gender inequality can unite to form areas of empowerment and disempowerment. Radical feminism explores the innate differences between male and female and attempts to assign certain characteristics specifically to females. Dramatistic/narrative criticism is based loosely around the idea of language as a connecting factor in basic human reality and motivation. This criticism adheres to the belief that the signs and symbols that are most important to our lives guide us and prompt us to react to them with different motivations. Thus, our reality lies in the symbols we use, especially the larger groups these fall into/link themselves with, such as a drama or a narrative. D/N critics study the way these signs work together with each other, along with what happens when these connections are broken. They use many different types of analyses to call attention to the meaningful and motivational functions that language performs. This criticism first places a text into a genre, then analyzes the language (vocabulary, structure, etc.) of its explanations for why things happen (is it because of the scene, a person, an establishment?). Media-centered criticism believes that texts should be analyzed with the medium in which they were published in mind; a videogame should not be treated the same as a scholarly journal. Television and computer media are easily the two most prevalent types of media in the world today—thus, every person has (consciously or unconsciously) internalized a generalization for the ways they are used and the way he/she should interact with them.

Three links to illustrate the point of this chapter:

-          The Music Industry and It’s Best Friend: Sexism – this blog article really seems to connect with the ideas about feminism that Brummett outlines in this chapter. The author of this article talks about the sexism of the music industry and how an artist like Katy Perry, who sings sexist (towards women) lyrics in her songs and is very over-sexualized in the media, has many more fans than a more honest, feminist artist like Amanda Palmer. I really thought this fit with the idea of the patriarchy that Brummett talks about – in our patriarchal society, it is more accepted (and even desirable) to be a thin, sexy, feminine popstar who sings about fulfilling the “teenage dream” of a younger man than it is to be an independent, honest, sassy artist who is confident with her body. The article also dips a very tiny little bit into queer theory when it talks about Kary Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” – it is frowned upon in this society for one woman to kiss another, so even though that is the entire premise of the song, Perry includes a line about how she knows ‘it’s not what the good girls do.’

 

-          The Lizzie Bennett Diaries – this project is absolutely fascinating to me. It is a scripted, filmed version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, played by actors and then posted to the web in the format of a video blog. The writers of the LBD have taken Pride and Prejudice out of its original medium and transplanted it into the medium of the Internet (and kind of television, too, with the visual element), and thus many things have changed. The language has had to change – from old-fashioned, formal, Victorian-age English to modern-day, informal, slang English – along with the storytelling itself – the narrative is no longer told from a 3^rd person POV, but in an almost 1^st person POV? The medium of Pride and Prejudice very much affects the way the story is told, and when that changes, as with the LBD, many other things must, too, which I found very interesting to watch.

-          Rewind that last part – I thought this little cartoon really illustrated what Brummett was talking about with different mediums and the way we as a culture can get so used to receiving information and interpreting experiences through one medium – the child in this cartoon is so used to television and the way a television functions that he is applying it to the rest of his life. 

Two discussion questions:

1. How does the medium of a text affect your interpretation of it - does a book unconsciously hold more authority to an audience than an article on the web? Does a news segment on your television seem more trustworthy than a magazine article? Why does this occur?

2. The genre of a text seems to change how people approach it (for instance, nobody reads a mystery novel the same way they read a New York Times article). Why is this - what is it about a New York Times article that makes us take it so seriously? Where did we learn to do this - assign different meanings to something based upon its genre? 

Rhetoric in Popular Culture ch. 3 - Brummett

Author, title, chapters: Barry Brummett, Rhetoric in Popular Culture,  chapter 3.

Thesis: Brummett argues that a text can give meaning to an object, event, or action, whether it is a meaning that struggles against the meaning another text has assigned to it, or a meaning that has been taken by the person who read the text and changed to fit their personal view of the world. In order to detect and analyze this meaning, one must use critical interpretation, which digs beneath the surface appearance of an object/text/etc. and asks questions about the complexity and meaning of it, seeking to discover the message the text is trying to communicate. Brummett then goes on to illustrate the ways one must carefully dig for the meaning, starting with how to classify a text, finding what the context of that text is, searching for ways the author tries to influence your opinion (through sentence structure, their phrasing, and the things they say), and remembering to keep in mind that your own personal experiences come into play when determining the significance that the text is trying to place on the occurrence, object, or event. 

What Brummett was talking about really made me think of celebrities and how every little move they make can be interpreted as something that it's not, or discussed and pored over and carefully dissected to extract any tiny bits of meaning. The entire time I was reading this chapter, I was thinking of this picture of Harry Styles (of the band One Direction):

Whenever Styles wears this shirt, speculation abounds about what it means: is he subtly confessing his homosexuality? Is he trying to make a point about gay marriage and its legality? Is he wearing it ironically? Is he secretly trying to express his love for fellow bandmate Louis Tomlinson (there are an inordinate number of rumors flying around on news websites and fan blogs of their alleged secret relationship)? 

Meanings such as these can be assigned so easily by the author of an article or a blog post, and I don't think any celebrity has escaped these kinds of speculations and instances of people reading things into their actions. 

Recently, Miley Cyrus got her hair cut and dyed. 

For almost anyone in the world, this would have sparked a few comments from friends and family: perhaps "Nice haircut!" or  "Love the new hair color!" For Miley, the reaction from fans, interviewers, news sites, etc. was instantaneous. People were outraged, confused, disgusted, adoring; nobody could agree on whether she was just doing it for the attention, or because she was trying to separate herself from her clean-cut, teenage pop-star image, or if she was heading in the same direction as Britney Spears did with her legendary head-shaving episode. So many meanings from a simple picture of a new hairdo!

To me, the most interesting aspect of Brummett's chapter was where he talked about how to read a text carefully and analytically for all the ways in which the author is trying to impress their own ideas of the meaning/significance of an event, object, action, etc. upon you as the reader: I had never before realized how simplistically I had been reading articles, books, even just my friends' opinions of a new blockbuster movie. They are all trying (whether they themselves realize it or not) to spread their own meaning to me, and some are less subtle than others: for example, when I read this review of the movie The Social Network, I was struck by how some of the language of the author affects my opinion of the film - just the words that they choose to describe it are already affecting the meaning that I'm assigning to it, and I've already seen this movie! The adjectives used to describe the movie and its cast are exciting and animated, and the writing style is fast-paced and enthusiastic - like the author is trying, with his/her own passion, to spread it to me. And it works! I find myself telling people how much I loved the movie for the same reasons as the review's author, while before I read this review I would probably have told you that it was a pretty average movie with a nice-looking cast that did a good job. 

Some further questions that I came up with on this reading are:

1. To use the Hunger Games as an example of the way in which people can struggle to assign something meaning, what is one action in the Hunger Games whose meaning changed/was struggled over? What were its different meanings and who was trying to assign each meaning to it?

2. Do you think the meanings that are assigned to things are out of your control, with media and pop culture ceaselessly pouring their own meanings into your head? Or do you assign your own meanings to everything? Somewhere in between? Explain.