Text Idea, Part 2.

Of course, after reading about the Irving v. Lipstadt trial, I am curious about the Holocaust-denier-as-victim mentality.  For those of you unfamiliar with the trial, David Irving, a "historian," sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel for remarks about Irving published in her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.  Under English libel laws, burden or proof fell on Lipstadt to prove the validity her statements.  Upon presentation of evidence, the court ruled in Lipstadt's favor.  

Of course, this is not the end of the story (no pun intended!).  Irving has expressed that he sees himself as a victim of an international conspiracy to silence him.  I'm wondering if an investigation of his rhetoric could help shed light on the Holocaust denier mentality and the broader field of genocide studies.   

Text idea

Returning to my idea of victimhood, I have decided that I would like to explore the relationship between notions of victimhood and hate speech.  I am leaning toward an analysis of the rhetoric of the KKK: how it frames U.S. history, how it constitutes its members/audiences, etc.  I haven't yet decided on the scope of my research: if I want to just focus on the contemporary KKK, a cross-temporal analysis of the KKK, or a look at comparisons of the KKK with other groups.  If anyone can help, I would appreciate it.

Close Textual Analysis: Oprah Winfrey's Eulogy for Rosa Parks

I imagine that this eulogy was challenging for Oprah* to write.  After all, how do you give a eulogy for Rosa Parks?   In my mind, few people could pull that off and do her justice in the eyes of the American public.  Yet, if anybody is going to deliver a eulogy for her, Oprah seems like an appropriate choice.  As Oprah looked to Rosa Parks as a hero, Oprah has also served as a hero to millions of people.  At the same time, as she mentions several times in the speech, Oprah would likely not be as successful as she is today without people like Rosa Parks.  It is Oprah's expression of this bond that brings special significance to Rosa Parks's legacy.

There are two important themes that reinforce this bond in the speech: magnitude and mobility.  In terms of magnitude, this speech is full of changes in size or effect.  For starters, Oprah begins this speech not as the grand public figure we usually think of, but rather as a small and innocent child.  And through her childlike, naive, romanticized version of the giant Rosa Parks, we already begin to see Oprah humbling herself below someone who she sees as literally and figuratively bigger than herself.  The humor in this, of course, is that Oprah grows up and meets the "petite, almost delicate lady who was the personification of grace and goodness" (para. 1).  Rosa Parks is not only physically small, but she also seems humble.  And so, through a little irony and role reversal, Oprah sets herself up to recast Rosa Parks as a hero who's larger than life.


Oprah accomplishes this recasting through climactic structure.  Through Oprah's descriptions, little Rosa Parks gets bigger and braver.  She moves from "confronting the one white man who[se] seat [she] took" to "confronting the bus driver" to "confronting the law" to  "confronting history" (para. 3).  As the effects of Rosa Parks's decision grow, Oprah once again becomes small and humble.  So when Oprah calls Rosa Parks a "good person" who does "great things," it's almost as if Oprah is correcting herself because the label "good" is not enough.  


However, there is often more to a eulogy than simply calling someone great.  Another common feature of eulogies, particularly of those that Campbell and Jamieson call "national eulogies," is to transcend the border between life and death by discussing how the deceased person's memory will live on through communal values.  Oprah does this beautifully through implications of mobility and immobility.  Rosa Parks is best remembered for being immobile, that is, for refusing to give up her seat.  This theme of immobility carries over into Oprah's allusion to the we-shall-not-be-moved mantra of the Civil Rights Movement.  


What's interesting here, however, is that Rosa Parks's decision to remain immobile in a society that was also immobile somehow managed to get things moving again.  "That day that you refused to give up your seat on the bus," Oprah notes, "you, Sister Rosa, changed the trajectory [emphasis added] of my life and the lives of so many other people in the world" (para. 2).  Oprah's use of the term "trajectory" here is much more powerful than other words she could have chosen ("direction," "path," "course," etc.) because it implies, at least in physics,  (1) some kind of force, and therefore a cause-and-effect relationship, and (2) a sense of unpredictability.  In other words, had Rosa Parks not intervened, U.S. society may have followed its predictable path and nothing would be different, even today.


Oprah then takes this message of immobility and applies it to herself.  Not only does she declare that she too "will not be moved," (para. 4), but she also says that she "owes [Rosa Parks] to succeed" (para. 4).  What Oprah means by success isn't exactly clear, but it seems that her version of success means empowering others in the same way that Rosa Parks empowered her.  If this is true, then Oprah's idea of magnitude comes full circle once again.  With Rosa Parks gone, the new small and humble Oprah (and, presumably, all of us),  must mature to fill the larger and more challenging role of carrying on the values she fought for.  This provides a beautiful resolution to a challenging speech.




* I apologize for being informal.  It just sounds awkward and unnatural to call Oprah "Winfrey" and Rosa Parks just "Parks." 

Welcome to my blog!   

I've never had my own blog before, so this should be interesting.  After resisting Cheryl's tempting suggestion to call my blog "Rhetoric Slut," (which I really think somebody should do one of these days, esp. someone interested in gender issues), I have decided to use this space to investigate conceptions of victimhood in narrative expressions.  As a coping mechanism for my disappointment about having to choose between Freedom of Speech and Narrative Analysis this semester, I have decided to use this class as a space to explore narrative criticism.  Specifically, I am interested in studying how contradictory narratives of victimhood (by which I mean narratives in which the so-called "victims" could also be viewed as oppressors or narratives in which two sides of a conflict both define themselves as victims--better definition to come!) arise and operate in discourse between groups in conflict with one another.  

Here are my main goals for the near future:

1) To narrow down my specific object(s) of study: The idea for this study came from some topics that I am already familiar with.  However, these subjects (The Tea Party movement and the Israeli-Palesitinian conflict) are not what I want to use for this project, partially because I want to learn something new and partially because these topics have been / are being explored by other people inside and outside of our field.  Unfortunately, when it comes to topic selection, I tend to be my own worst enemy.

2) To learn more about how narrative criticism: My narrative analysis exposure is pretty limited so far.  In my reading, I hope to investigate how it has been used by other scholars: what method(s) they have used, what objects they have studied, what they have found, and what narrative analysis can "contribute" to both the study of rhetoric and the community at large (and, of course, the State of Texas . . . )

Of course, I ultimately want this project to be research that grows out of my own interests, struggles, creativity, and genius, but suggestions (topics, readings, etc.) are most welcome.