Rhetorical Agency and Spoon River

Instead of trying to analyze all of the articles for this week, I will mainly focus on Cooper’s “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” The author offers this insight about agency at the end of her discussion:

Responsible agency instead requires one to be aware that everyone acts out of their own space of meaning and that to affirm one’s own meaning as absolute truth is to negate the other person (442).

Cooper emphasized the need to recognize agents as individuals with certain attitudes, goals and desires. She says agents are “self-organizing” in that they are “always changing” (425). I begin with these descriptions, because I think they get to the root of rhetorical agency more so (or at least more to my liking) than the other scholars. In response to Geisler, Lundberg and Gunn strive to answer (or at least ask) this question: ‘Where do we locate responsibility when agency is exercised?’ (94) Who takes up the mantle when it comes to agency? Is it the rhetor or the audience?

It seems what Cooper shows is that agency lies with both. She states the following: “Agency is a matter of action; it involves doing things intentionally and voluntarily, but it is not a matter of causing whatever happened.” Agency invites change, but it does not necessarily cause change (439). Thus, the relationship between rhetor and audience is ongoing and circular. There is always a need for interaction (an idea Miller puts forth as well). Miller discusses how this interaction is lost with computer-based assessments such as the AutoSpeech-Easy system she posed to her colleagues (although we use cameras for other kinds of communication).

This might be a stretch, but the idea of response and action between the speaker and audience brought to mind Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. This work contains the epitaphs of 212 characters (deceased citizens of Spoon River). Each citizen tells his or her tale from “the hill” (the grave). Although they are dead, they speak to the audience as if they have agency. The tales connect to each other as the characters are connected to each other through past events and trials. The “speaker” of each poem enacts the possibility of change, although we, as readers, know that change is not possible for these characters. However, we give them agency because they have knowledge about what happened in Spoon River that we do not. The following is tale by Minerva Jones, the village poetess:

I AM Minerva, the village poetess,

Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street

For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,

And all the more when "Butch" Weldy

Captured me after a brutal hunt.

He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;

And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,

Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.

Will some one go to the village newspaper,

And gather into a book the verses I wrote?--

I thirsted so for love

I hungered so for life! (Link to poem)

Minerva asks the audience a question, but it is clear that no one can answer her. It is interesting that even though these characters are dead, Masters writes in a way that allows the reader to interact with them (some on a more personal level than others). Each character still has the capacity to persuade the reader to believe what they are saying. There is still a responsibility present, even though it may not be quite the same as listening to a speech or experimenting with an Ouija Board.