The author of the article “The
Rhetorical Situation”, Lloyd Bitzer, defines rhetorical situation as “A complex
of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential
exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced
into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about
the significant modification of the exigence.” Bitzer says in the article that
there are three parts that make up any rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. After reading the article, I would
probably describe exigence as any imperfection that is marked by urgency or a
problem that is basically waiting to be solved. Exigence becomes rhetorical
when it is capable of a positive modification. I think a good example of
exigence is child abuse. It is a problem that is urgent to be changed, and its
positive modification would be the child getting taken away by its abusive
parent(s). The next part is audience. The audience is only considered to be
rhetorical if they can be influenced by the situation, and care about the
situation. An example of this would be the people who learned about child
abuse, and care to stand up for the children receiving abuse from their
parent(s). The last thing Bitzer talked
about was the set of constraints. The constraints are made up of persons,
events, objects, and relations. They are important because they have the power
to coerce decision and action needed to change the exigence. For example, maybe
a constraint for the child abuse exigence would be a child talking about
getting abused.
No comments:
Post a Comment