Due by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, February 7th
“The School of Athens”, Raphael, 1509-1511
For your first formal critical essay in our class, you will use the rhetorical method of Neo-Aristotelian criticism to discover and write about the available means of persuasion in a speech of your choice. Please follow our class meetings and assigned readings on the steps for writing a Neo-Aristotelian criticism. Also, please be patient and make sure to read and learn from the model essays discussed during the class period before selecting your own rhetorical artifacts.
For this posting, locate a speech for your analysis. You are free to locate a speech from any media, and the speech can be either a fiction or nonfiction one. For example, the speech can be an actual presidential or political address which can help you make a case for a certain type of leadership rhetoric and its possible effect on audiences. Or you can find a movie, a TV program, or another mediated text that features the delivery of a speech and analyze it in relation to a certain issue (identity, race, gender, morality, or another everyday exigency). Ideally, for this posting, the full transcript or a portion of your selected artifact should be available online so that you can include its link in your posting. If not, find another way to describe the speech and include portions in your posting.
In your posting, describe the rhetorical situation (rhetor, audience, topic, purpose, and context) of your selected artifact (2-3 paragraphs); the more details you can provide to inform us about your selected artifact, the better.
We will build on this posting during our class on Thursday, February 8th (see the course schedule). Therefore, your posting by the due date of 5 pm on February 7th (for instructor review) is essential.
Feel free to discuss your ideas with me inside or outside of the class period.