audience and the rhetorical situation
My dissertation is about, among other things, what we can get out of viewing narratives through the lens of rhetoric. This focus means that I do a lot of writing about rhetorical situations.
"Rhetorical situation" is most simply explained as "somebody telling a particular story to a particular audience under particular circumstances for a particular purpose."
As it turns out, this concept has explanatory power not only for fictional texts but for my life in general and my well-documented procrastinatory habits in particular. Which is to say: as of about ten minutes ago, I am finally able to articulate reason #782 why teaching, vidding (and other fannish pursuits), web design, and even conference papers appeal to me more than dissertating.
My dissertation has no audience.
All right, I suppose that's not quite literally true; my committee will constitute a four-person audience, and truepenny and anyone else that I browbeat into helping me with it will be an audience in some technical sense. And it is theoretically possible, if unlikely, that some floundering future graduate student will feel a need to read what I have to say about Tristram Shandy or Foe, although for their sakes I certainly hope not.
My dissertation's audience, then, is highly artificial - constructed rather than natural - and its needs are, in many cases, extremely difficult for me to gauge or account for. In other cases, its needs are quite clear, but so uninteresting to me as to constitute giant mental roadblocks rather than helpful signposts.
And here's the most important thing: even allowing that the audience does in some limited sense exist, the rhetorical gesture of the dissertation has no consequences for them. It has consequences for me, certainly, but not for the audience.
That fact is merely one more piece of evidence for the argument that dissertations are fundamentally unnatural rhetorical acts. The whole point of rhetoric is to produce effects through speech or writing. But in this case, there's no real effect to produce. It's the shell of a rhetorical situation without any of the intent or content; it's just lobbing turnips into the void.
Teaching, by contrast, is all about audience. I mean, I can behave as if the students aren't there, but, you know, I've been in those classes. It never ends well. Good teaching cannot happen without accounting for audience: what students already know, what they need to know, how they will react to certain ideas and performances and assignments and actions. One cannot anticipate these reactions with absolute precision in every case (which is part of what makes teaching so exciting), but anyone who's been a student and is endowed with even a small amount of imagination and empathy can make a pretty good guess. Where one goes from there is a separate question; awareness of audience is not the sole ingredient of good teaching. But knowing one's audience is crucial, and sustained teaching (especially of a particular population) allows one to develop and refine and test that knowledge over time.
Moreover, good teaching is aimed not merely at "students" as a category, but at a particular set of students in a particular institutional, historical, social, cultural, geographical context - a particular rhetorical situation. And that set of students, that audience, is there every time I walk into a classroom. If I pay attention, I can see what effects are produced by individual pedagogical (rhetorical) maneuvers, and I can strategically deploy further maneuvers in response.
The audience for my vids is less immediately knowable and in some ways more varied, but it's nevertheless there - and, as a rule, it's voluntary. One of the reasons feedback pleases me so much is that it's a welcome reminder of the existence of that audience, the real people who chose to watch something I made. Furthering my knowledge of my tools and my craft produces a certain abstract "I learned something!" satisfaction, but even more satisfying is the increased ability to produce particular effects on an audience through careful management of the juxtapositions of images and sounds. (...sorry about that last sentence; I have in fact been dissertating all morning, which always has deleterious effects on my diction and syntax.)
Even my conference papers benefit from the assumed fact of an actual audience, to be assembled at a particular time and place, whom as a rule I would prefer not to bore to death. I dislike conferences with a fervor that I'm not even going to attempt to convey, but I do more of them and take them more seriously than I do chapters or articles, precisely (I've realized) because there's an actual voluntary flesh-and-blood audience waiting at the end of the process. Whereas the world is full of journals of literary criticism whose contents are pointless and uninteresting at best and shockingly, depressingly, irrecoverably bad at worst. Nobody with any sense of self-preservation reads that stuff with any regularity. It's my chosen field, and *I* don't fucking read it.
I have no illusions about the lack of audience for academic literary criticism. I hate that it's true, but it *is* true, and it's true partly for excellent reasons having to do with the sad fact that many academics refuse to write as if an audience of normal intelligent nonacademic human beings might be even a remote possibility. (These academics are often the same ones who refuse to teach as if students actually exist.) So I do my damndest not to write like that, occasional lapses notwithstanding.
But I cannot get around the fact that, compared to the communicative endeavors that I most enjoy, my dissertation has no audience. And that's part of why I have been so stalled for so long.
I can't see a way to fix this problem. I suppose I could try adjusting my attitude, but I don't *want* to adjust my attitude. Caring about audience is a good thing, something I'm committed to, not something that I want to try to give up, however strategically or temporarily.
I really fucking hate this particular academic hoop and the way in which I have to jump through it. There are a lot of things about graduate school that I have enjoyed and even some from which I have benefitted, but I hate its disassociation from - not some arbitrary straw-man "real life," in which I don't actually believe, but fundamental truths about the nature and value of human communication, in which I do fervently believe.
I am committed to finishing this dissertation, but I don't like the feeling of struggling constantly against the current of my own intellectual priorities.
On the plus side, it's now lunchtime, which means squash curry. Life's not all bad.
"Rhetorical situation" is most simply explained as "somebody telling a particular story to a particular audience under particular circumstances for a particular purpose."
As it turns out, this concept has explanatory power not only for fictional texts but for my life in general and my well-documented procrastinatory habits in particular. Which is to say: as of about ten minutes ago, I am finally able to articulate reason #782 why teaching, vidding (and other fannish pursuits), web design, and even conference papers appeal to me more than dissertating.
My dissertation has no audience.
All right, I suppose that's not quite literally true; my committee will constitute a four-person audience, and truepenny and anyone else that I browbeat into helping me with it will be an audience in some technical sense. And it is theoretically possible, if unlikely, that some floundering future graduate student will feel a need to read what I have to say about Tristram Shandy or Foe, although for their sakes I certainly hope not.
My dissertation's audience, then, is highly artificial - constructed rather than natural - and its needs are, in many cases, extremely difficult for me to gauge or account for. In other cases, its needs are quite clear, but so uninteresting to me as to constitute giant mental roadblocks rather than helpful signposts.
And here's the most important thing: even allowing that the audience does in some limited sense exist, the rhetorical gesture of the dissertation has no consequences for them. It has consequences for me, certainly, but not for the audience.
That fact is merely one more piece of evidence for the argument that dissertations are fundamentally unnatural rhetorical acts. The whole point of rhetoric is to produce effects through speech or writing. But in this case, there's no real effect to produce. It's the shell of a rhetorical situation without any of the intent or content; it's just lobbing turnips into the void.
Teaching, by contrast, is all about audience. I mean, I can behave as if the students aren't there, but, you know, I've been in those classes. It never ends well. Good teaching cannot happen without accounting for audience: what students already know, what they need to know, how they will react to certain ideas and performances and assignments and actions. One cannot anticipate these reactions with absolute precision in every case (which is part of what makes teaching so exciting), but anyone who's been a student and is endowed with even a small amount of imagination and empathy can make a pretty good guess. Where one goes from there is a separate question; awareness of audience is not the sole ingredient of good teaching. But knowing one's audience is crucial, and sustained teaching (especially of a particular population) allows one to develop and refine and test that knowledge over time.
Moreover, good teaching is aimed not merely at "students" as a category, but at a particular set of students in a particular institutional, historical, social, cultural, geographical context - a particular rhetorical situation. And that set of students, that audience, is there every time I walk into a classroom. If I pay attention, I can see what effects are produced by individual pedagogical (rhetorical) maneuvers, and I can strategically deploy further maneuvers in response.
The audience for my vids is less immediately knowable and in some ways more varied, but it's nevertheless there - and, as a rule, it's voluntary. One of the reasons feedback pleases me so much is that it's a welcome reminder of the existence of that audience, the real people who chose to watch something I made. Furthering my knowledge of my tools and my craft produces a certain abstract "I learned something!" satisfaction, but even more satisfying is the increased ability to produce particular effects on an audience through careful management of the juxtapositions of images and sounds. (...sorry about that last sentence; I have in fact been dissertating all morning, which always has deleterious effects on my diction and syntax.)
Even my conference papers benefit from the assumed fact of an actual audience, to be assembled at a particular time and place, whom as a rule I would prefer not to bore to death. I dislike conferences with a fervor that I'm not even going to attempt to convey, but I do more of them and take them more seriously than I do chapters or articles, precisely (I've realized) because there's an actual voluntary flesh-and-blood audience waiting at the end of the process. Whereas the world is full of journals of literary criticism whose contents are pointless and uninteresting at best and shockingly, depressingly, irrecoverably bad at worst. Nobody with any sense of self-preservation reads that stuff with any regularity. It's my chosen field, and *I* don't fucking read it.
I have no illusions about the lack of audience for academic literary criticism. I hate that it's true, but it *is* true, and it's true partly for excellent reasons having to do with the sad fact that many academics refuse to write as if an audience of normal intelligent nonacademic human beings might be even a remote possibility. (These academics are often the same ones who refuse to teach as if students actually exist.) So I do my damndest not to write like that, occasional lapses notwithstanding.
But I cannot get around the fact that, compared to the communicative endeavors that I most enjoy, my dissertation has no audience. And that's part of why I have been so stalled for so long.
I can't see a way to fix this problem. I suppose I could try adjusting my attitude, but I don't *want* to adjust my attitude. Caring about audience is a good thing, something I'm committed to, not something that I want to try to give up, however strategically or temporarily.
I really fucking hate this particular academic hoop and the way in which I have to jump through it. There are a lot of things about graduate school that I have enjoyed and even some from which I have benefitted, but I hate its disassociation from - not some arbitrary straw-man "real life," in which I don't actually believe, but fundamental truths about the nature and value of human communication, in which I do fervently believe.
I am committed to finishing this dissertation, but I don't like the feeling of struggling constantly against the current of my own intellectual priorities.
On the plus side, it's now lunchtime, which means squash curry. Life's not all bad.