Rethinking Rhetoric after attending Graduate Student Panel

I attended the “Making Meaning” conference this past Friday where I heard two graduate students speak about rhetoric in healthcare and law. The first speaker I listened to was Elizabeth Brewer, who is a Ph. D student from Ohio State University studying Disability Studies. Her talk was entitled “What is so ‘Schizophrenic’ About that Text? A Disability Studies Approach to the Usage of ‘Schizophrenic’ in Critical Theory and Academic Discourse”. I have chosen to complete my rhetorical analysis paper on this talk, so I will go into much more detail about the effectiveness of her argument in my paper. Her talk did inspire a few thoughts in my mind about how to effectively use language to convey a message to an intended audience. Something that stood out to me about Elizabeth’s paper was her structure. She used a lot of direct quotes to introduce new points. For instance, her paper began with a quote from N. Katherine Hale about discerning between metaphors that enlighten and metaphors that disillusion. This tied into the topic she was discussing, which was a criticism of using the term “schizophrenic” as a universal metaphor. Using a quote was a thought provoking way to grab the attention of the audience, which was mostly graduate and undergraduate students interested in rhetoric. It allowed the audience to think about their own interpretation of the quote, and compare it to Elizabeth’s analysis. I thought this was a useful technique in reaching out to audiences and it allowed me to see the importance of language in rhetoric.

In addition to language, I have been thinking about what types of evidence would be the strongest way to reach out to the intended audience to persuade them of the speaker’s view. Would it be best to use case studies, expert opinions, or statistics? The second speaker, Patrick Barry, who is a graduate student in English at the University of Michigan, and also a law student at the University of Chicago, gave a talk entitled “What is Henry David Thoreau doing in the Supreme Court Opinion of the Amish? The Role of Literary Allusions in Judicial Opinions”. I thought Patrick had a great use of examples to argue his point and qualifiers. He gave an example of a Supreme Court case evaluating whether the Amish could stop going to school at age 16 for religious purposes. This led the court to closely examine the meaning of the word “religion”. Is it merely a group of people who follow a set of beliefs that distinguish them from the remaining population? What about Thoreau, in Walden, when he isolated himself and lived in the woods? Would this be considered a religion? These questions asked in the court ruling related to the class discussion I mentioned in a previous post about finding a common definition for ambiguous words before reaching an opinion about them. In the case of Patrick’s argument, this was a case where a literary allusion was not correctly used to qualify a definition.

Going back to Elizabeth’s argument, I began to think more about identity and what it is comprised of. If someone has a disability, meaning a physical handicap, is that a part of his or her identity? According to Elizabeth, it is. But doesn’t that raise some moral concerns as to what we really seek from people? We are going to perceive a person in a certain way if we see that he is disabled, and sometimes we do not look further than the physical disability and can’t move past our preconceived notion. Usually, when we see disabled people we feel sympathy, instead of recognizing that they too, are human beings just like us. Although they are physically disabled, there are still aspects of them, such as their thoughts and personalities, that can relate to those who are not disabled. So, going back to my previous post on the question posed by William James, after attending this lecture, I would have to agree with Elizabeth. That, yes, our bodies do determine our identities, whether consciously or unconsciously.