“Invention and Identification Through Intertextual Appropriation of Academic Discourse”

by George Shamshayooadeh | Xchanges 9.1

Literature Review

In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke challenges the rationalistic, Aristotelian notion of persuasion through logical, emotional, and ethical appeals by asserting that identification with one’s audience is the primary means through which persuasion is achieved. Burke’s explication of identification is fairly straightforward: “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55).

The Aristotelian conception of persuasion works primarily through the use of arguments in a rationalistic manner, which is based on the assumption that persuasion primarily functions at the conscious level. Burke, however, contends that identification could be achieved by invoking the opinion that the speaker knows the audience will find appealing, which in turn would make it more likely that they would be swayed by the orator’s or writer’s arguments. Another way through which identification is attained is through the use of formal rhetorical devices such as asyndeton, polysyndeton, antithesis, climax, and anaphora.

Burke considers the use of linguistic “signs” indispensable to achieving “consubstantiality” or common ground between author and audience. In “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry,” Burke presents his case for identification as the major rhetorical term that would result in persuasion:

Hence we take the position that a “rhetoric of the unconscious,” in keeping with psychoanalytic criticism and the Marxist study of “ideology,” offers the only fruitful extension beyond the Aristotelian stress. This, we believe, under the aegis of “identification” as key term. (336)

Burke’s notion of identification is social and dialogic as well since he places the individual consciousness in dialectical relation to other individuals as participants in the social processes. In “Rhetoric – Old and New” he sums up the difference between old and new rhetoric: “the key term for the ‘new’ rhetoric would be ‘identification,’ which can include a partially unconscious factor in appeal” (203).

In Singular Texts/Plural Authors, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford argue that the heteroglossic nature of language results in “a polyphonic self, one that can never constitute the single ‘voice’ traditionally ascribed to the author” (92). George Dillon, however, considers the interaction and collision between the different voices/texts instrumental to the formation of a “personal” voice (71). As Bazerman observes, “Through such [intertextual] relations a text evokes a representation of the discourse situation, the textual resources that bear on the situation, and how the current text positions itself and draws on other texts” (86).

As previously noted, Bakhtin underlines and explicates the addressivity of language. In texts, dialogic, intertextual interrelations could be explicit in the form of quotations and paraphrases or implicit in the form of allusions, images, symbols, motifs, as well as shared thematic and conceptual relations/presuppositions. Germane to the issue of intertextuality is appropriation, which Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define as “the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others’ meanings to one’s own ends” (350).