Rhetorical Analyses: Readings

Chapter Opener

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Rhetorical Analyses: Readings

See also Chapter 8:

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Paula Marantz Cohen, Too Much Information: The Pleasure of Figuring Things Out for Yourself,

ANALYSIS OF AN ARGUMENT

Matthew James Nance, A Mockery of Justice,

CULTURAL ANALYSIS

J. Reagan Tankersley, Humankind’s Ouroboros,

GENRE MOVES: RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Susan Sontag, From Notes on “Camp”

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Deborah Tannen, Oh, Mom. Oh, Honey.: Why Do You Have to Say That?

ANALYSIS OF AN ADVERTISEMENT

Stanley Fish, The Other Car

CULTURAL ANALYSIS

Laurie Fendrich, The Beauty of the Platitude

FILM ANALYSIS

Daniel D’Addario, Johnny Depp’s Tonto Misstep: Race and The Lone Ranger

ANALYSIS OF AN ADVERTISEMENT

Caroline Leader, Dudes Come Clean: Negotiating a Space for Men in Household Cleaner Commercials

GENRE MOVES Rhetorical Analysis

GENRE MOVES Rhetorical Analysis

SUSAN SONTAG

From “Notes on ‘Camp’”

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility —unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it — that goes by the cult name of “Camp.” . . .

  1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
  2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.
  3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are “campy” movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.
  4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:

Zuleika Dobson

Tiffany lamps

Scopitone films

the Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.

the Enquirer, headlines and stories

Aubrey Beardsley drawings

Swan Lake

Bellini’s operas

Visconti’s direction of Salome and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards

Schoedsack’s King Kong

the Cuban pop singer La Lupe

Lynd Ward’s novel in woodcuts, Gods’ Man

the old Flash Gordon comics

women’s clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)

the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett

Make your notes into an essay.

In this famous essay written in 1964, Susan Sontag actually lists fifty-eight “notes” about “camp” sensibility. She seems to create this long list because she simply has too much to say about “camp” to narrow her focus effectively. When assembled, though, Sontag’s list of notes and “random examples” gives the reader a distinct impression of her topic and provides specifics that begin to support her generalizations about a slippery subject.

Likewise, some of the texts or performances or phenomena that you might want to analyze will feel as though they are too complicated and multifaceted for you to choose just one thesis, or even to choose just four to five supporting ideas. Or you may be the sort of writer who prefers to think in lists — and you would rather gather lots of different ideas than focus on just one to begin with.

In your own rhetorical analysis, you might create such a list as a form of prewriting. Consider simply creating a list of responses, ideas, evaluations, and arguments about the thing you are analyzing. For instance, if you are evaluating an advertisement, you’d want to watch it multiple times and record as many impressions and observations as you can about the ad. Then reorder your list to make it more organized. You might see ways that certain thoughts build on or respond to other thoughts. Then you can choose one major idea and seek some other ideas that work to support your larger thesis; the rest can probably be discarded. But you might also consider shaping your notes into an unconventional essay, as Sontag does so successfully here.