Title: The Rhetorical-Theatrical Sensibility as Equipment for Living
Abstract: Introduction The linkage between rhetoric theater is a preexisting one. As mediums of communication, are addressed, embodied, performative. Both constitute appeal to an audience, which is there to exercise judgment. Both produce reproduce the culture in a public venue. Both are supposed to effect a fusion between ethics esthetics, virtue virtuosity, doing so by giving presence to a seeming to be. As lenses of interpretation, each can be borrowed to shed light on the other. Every theatrical performance has its rhetorical thrust. Every rhetorical performance is an act in the drama of human relations, as such, is subject to comprehension in dramatistic terms. A theatrical vocabulary not only sheds light on speech but also on writing because the latter can also have a staged quality to it. Written discourse makes a theater in its own way. As worldviews, rhetoric theater have always informed animated each other. As academic disciplines, the two often end up sharing the same institutional home. As communicative events, the two frequently share the same physical space, inviting the audience to see them as epideictic displays to see the one in terms of the other. Although Aristotle, the great system builder cataloguer, treats rhetoric theater separately--the one in Rhetoric the other in Poetics--good rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke know to bring them back together to illuminate symbolic action, which is seldom purely one way (suasive) or the other (as symbolic action for its own sake). Burke's both ... and approach has culminated in the invention of the root metaphor of dramatism, which transforms our understanding of communication life. The dramatistic sensibility is also found in George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman Victor Turner, Richard Lanham, Mark Backman, among others. The purpose of this essay is to explore the overlapping semantic fields of rhetoric theater, affirmatively critique the dramatistic, or rhetorical theatrical, worldview, articulate the mature efficacy that comes with it in this age of sophistication tele-presence. The argument is that the rhetorical theatrical sensibility enhances our awareness of man as a social, political actor with mixed motives reality as contingent verisimilitudes staged through communication. The essay claims that in the face of such a reality, scientism literalism are crippling while the rhetorical theatrical sensibility is life enhancing since it enables us to comprehend the world more correctly operate in it more effectively. The Practical Inseparability of Rhetoric Theater The drama frame encompasses not just theatrical drama rhetoric (enacted ritual drama) but also what Turner calls social drama. (1) There are profound connections parallels among them. A thoroughgoing theatrical sensibility would challenge the demarcation line between them. The title of Turner's book From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play is simply a stroke of genius, which not only captures all three senses at once but also gestures toward productive lines of inquiry. (2) What theatrical drama puts on display are conflicts among fallible humans. Being human fallible, we feel emotionally implicated invested. As the conflicts evolve, so do the curves of our emotions. As the hero comes to a tragic end, we are relieved of pent-up emotional energy. The more we identify with the hero, the more thorough our sense of purgation catharsis. The Medusa myth is perhaps the best myth we have to explain the mechanism behind catharsis. Theatrical drama as an art form is like the shield in the Medusa myth, which allows us to face our psychological problems ('Medusa) indirectly, so we can deal with them without being crushed by them (without being petrified). A similar mechanism is found in rhetoric. In entelechial terms, rhetoric concerns itself with the drama of human congregation segregation or the negotiation of consubstantiality division. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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