4 Desarrollo central
4.3 Evaluación del sistema de tratamiento
Rhetorical scholars have debated the role of text in criticism for decades. One side of the debate over the role of the text in rhetorical criticism centered the text as the focal point of criticism. Michael Leff forwarded a model of rhetorical scholarship based on “close textual analysis.” Leff argued that a “preoccupation with abstract theories and methods” led rhetorical
critics to disengage with careful interpretation of texts as sites of rhetorical action.5 Therefore, Leff advocated closely “reading and rereading of the text” as opposed to a reliance on formulaic methods based on Aristotelian theory, Burkeian dramatism, or any other such rhetorical
methodology.6 Thus, Leff advocated an “emic” approach to rhetorical criticism that privileged the text as a particular object of study, that in turn dictates the theory the critic should apply.7 Leff spurred on a line of criticism based on his idea of close reading.8 These scholars centered the text within their criticisms to come to vastly different conclusions about a wide range of texts. The first two chapters of this dissertation could be said to follow Leff’s lead in closely reading a particular text. That is, both chapters focus on singular pivotal moments wherein WWE altered the narrative address to its audience. Therein, I argued that the application of a
methodology rooted in rhetorical narratology provides insight into how these texts renegotiated the power dynamic between producer and consumer, thus exhibiting narrative’s usefulness in closely analyzing texts.
In opposition to close textual analysis, Michael Calvin McGee argued that there is no such thing as a discrete text. McGee argued, “critical rhetoric does not begin with a finished text in need of interpretation; rather, texts are understood to be larger than the apparently finished
5 Michael Leff, “Interpretation and the Art of the Rhetorical Critic,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 44 (1980), 338.
6 Michael Leff, “Textual Criticism: The Legacy of G.P. Mohrmann,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986), 380.
7 Leff, “Interpretation,” 348.
8 See for example: Edwin Black, “Gettysburg and Silence,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994), 21-36; Michael Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” Communication Reports 1 (1988), 26-31; Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs, “Words the most like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990), 252-273; Stephen Lucas, “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of
Independence,” in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, Fourth Edition, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2010), 205-220; Richard Olsen, “Fifty-Eight American Dreams: The NBA Draft as Mediated Ritual,” in Case Studies in Sport Communication, eds. Robert S. Brown and Daniel J. O’Rourke III (Westport, CT:
discourse that presents itself as transparent.”9 McGee further clarifies that supposedly finished
and discrete “texts” are part of an arrangement of fragments “that includes all facts, events texts, and stylized expressions deemed useful in explaining its influence and exposing its meaning.10 Thus, texts are not closed pieces of discourse, but sit in relation to their sources, culture, and later influence. Further, McGee argues that as communication becomes more fragmented in our modern culture, consumers no longer approach full texts but only “discursive fragments of context.”11 As a result, McGee claims that consumers and producers switch roles, as producers
provide audiences with fragments that “cue them to produce a finished discourse in their minds. In short, text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse.”12Criticism following McGee’s model pays less attention to any single text but pulls together multiple “fragments” of texts in the service of exposing how rhetoric influences power on a broader scale. The current chapter follows more in the vein of McGee by pulling together fragments of discourse spanning a larger amount of time to create a “text” for criticism. Thus, this analysis demonstrates the usefulness of structural narratology as a framework for reconstructing the “text” from fragments.
Rhetorical narratology, as a method, proves useful for both Leff’s and McGee’s models of rhetorical criticism largely due to its nuanced conception of audience. As pointed out in the introduction, Celeste Condit, in her response to the Leff/McGee debate, argues that both scholars went to their respective extremes to deal with the concept of the audience.13 She claims that Leff
9 McGee, “Fragmentation,” 279.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 287.
12 Ibid., 288 (emphasis in original).
13 Celeste Condit, “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff,” Western Journal of
responded to pressure from “audience studies” by not engaging with the actual audience but instead examining “the responses that were ‘invited’ by a text.”14 Condit argues that McGee goes
to the other extreme abandoning the text in favor of the audience, which she claims overplays the power of the audience.15 Condit cautions that creative decoding is not the same as textual
construction.16 Further, Condit warns that both Leff’s and McGee’s treatment of audiences risks falling into “chasms” of being either falsely universal or hopelessly individual. Leff, she argues, falls into the first void by assuming “invitations” in the text are universal despite the specificity of multiple audiences. McGee, on the other hand, risks the other void, becoming hopelessly individual by reading audiences as his texts, thereby rendering rhetoric formless. Condit finally argues that both ultimately fail “because rhetoric is neither individual nor universal, but
collective.”17 Rhetorical narratology’s typology of audience provides a method for avoiding the
chasms into which Condit argues both Leff and McGee fall.
The first two chapters provided close readings of singular texts, identifying “invitations” from the producers of wrestling narratives to their audience. But, importantly, the analyses used the tripartite understanding of author and audience to complicate the notion of these invitations, noting what invitations were made by which type of author (actual, implied, or narrator) to which type of audience (actual, authorial, or narrative). Further, this understanding of audience
provided the language for assessing the actual audience’s participatory behavior as an exigence
14 Ibid., 333-334.
15 Ibid., 339-340.
16 Ibid.; Condit’s remarks here address the debate over the ability and limits of audiences to read multiple meanings from texts. For a fuller understanding of this debate, see: Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998), 395-415; Celeste Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989), 103-122.
for change. By combining narratological theories of audience with rhetorical theories of personae, the previous chapter also avoided characterizing the invitations of WWE Creative as universal to all audiences, instead showing how WWE embedded textual cues to provide for a polysemic text.
The current chapter, in turn, uses rhetorical narratology’s typology of audience as a guide in piecing together the fragments of discourse to create a “critical text.” By focusing on the narrative address of the audience, and the response of the narrative audience to that address, I hope to avoid McGee’s chasm of over-individualizing audiences. Further, this chapter takes Condit’s suggestion that rhetoric is “collective” by focusing on the ability of audience address to discursively construct a collective subjectivity. Barbara Biesecker argues that critical rhetoric formulates the audience as a part of a complex process of signification in which rhetor, audience and text all play a role in the construction of a discursive formation.18 Thus, this chapter shows
how authors (both implied and narrator) invite active responses from the audience (both implied and narrative) through the fragmented narrative address, but also how a collective subject can resist the invitations and exercise agency as a “people” to influence change in the production of narrative texts. I now turn to the case study of Daniel Bryan’s rise to WrestleMania to show narratology’s utility for analyzing a fragmented text.