Christian Kock

A Good Paper Makes a Case: Teaching Academic Writing the Macro-Toulmin Way

In this paper, we contend that students’ problems with genre and task definition in the writing of academic papers may be helped if we adapt Toulmin’s argument model to explain what the genre requirements of the academic paper are, as opposed to everyday argumentation. The student should be encouraged to apply the model as an assessment criterion and, at the same time, as a heuristic tool during her work on the paper. This involves a ‘macroscopic’ or ‘top-down’ approach to the evolving draft, not a ‘microscopic’ analysis of individual passages. The paper suggests a number of class activities that will help students apply a ‘Macro-Toulmin’ view to their own work.

Evaluation of Public Spokespersons

Department of Education, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Copenhagen University, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, kock@hum.ku.dk ...but when I was speaking in America, they told me that there were 105 million TV sets in America ... It is a strange feeling to speak to millions of people. I think one feels it. There is something strange about television, very odd, also in another way. They told me over there that television is dangerous, it gives you away, you can’t hide your true nature, appearing on television. They said that McCarthy, then a very popular person, was ruined in one or two days, after appearing on television. People did not believe him, or they did not trust him any more.... In general, people who appeared on television over there were kind of “waterproof”. (Quotation from radio interview with Karen Blixen, 1955)

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

Abstract This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.

The Semiotics and Rhetoric of Music: A Case Study in Aesthetic Protocol Analysis

This paper investigates musical semiotics (how listeners experience meanings in music). It discusses what bearing listeners’ experience of meanings may have for their aesthetic experience of music. The study is rhetorical because its focus is effect, not meanings in themselves. It employs “aesthetic protocol analysis,” a design where informants write about their responses and associations while they experience an aesthetic artifact—in this case the first movement of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. It is found that listeners’ experienced meanings are fleeting and of multifarious types, showing both intersubjective overlap and divergence. The main claim is that finding meanings in music should not be the purpose of listening; rather, engagement with musical meanings should be seen as a source of, and a means to, aesthetic experience.

PLENARY SESSION IV. Rhetorics in Media Studies – Media Studies in Rhetorics. Rhetoric in Media Studies

Rhetoric takes a view of media and of public communication generally that we may call functionalist. Rhetoricians tend to think that we use public discourse to do certain things for us with words. Rhetoric is a practical subject, which also implies that it is normative: it will teach us, not only to do certain things with words, but also to do these things well with words. Because rhetoric is about doing things well with words, it is also central to it that we should always be very aware of what we are trying to do, for we can do many different things with words, and they need to be done with different words; in general rhetoric teaches us that the function a message is meant to serve very largely determines all the properties that the message should have, which again implies that messages meant to serve different functions will have very different properties.

The function of poetry in our lives : Roman Jakobson's legacy and challenge to poetics

Abstract Jakobsons main legacy to poetics is the notion of “the poetic function.” His seminal idea that language has several functions, and that one of them is the poetic function, is found throughout his work, from the long sketch on Khlebnikovs poetry (1919) to the “locus classicus” on the poetic function, the article “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960).